Durieux, Tilla

(Ottilie Godefroy, 1880-1971)

   Actress. Durieux was among the most provocative actresses on the German stage in the initial years of the 20th century. Viennese by birth, Durieux began her acting career in Olmütz and Breslau before coming to Berlin in 1903 to work with Max Reinhardt. He found her stunning beauty and irresistible magnetism invaluable for his Frank Wedekind, Carl Sternheim, and Oscar Wilde productions. She created sensations in the title role of Wilde's Salome and later in Wedekind's Lulu plays, flaunting the characters' lascivious allure in a galvanizingly unwonted manner. Durieux also assisted Reinhardt with police censors; she "entertained" them on numerous occasions and often succeeded in getting performance bans lifted. Further, Durieux was instrumental in helping secure funding for Reinhardt and later in the 1920s for Erwin Piscator.

   Durieux's first husband, Paul Cassirer (1871-1926), was a publisher and important art patron who assisted Reinhardt. Her second, the wealthy brewer Ludwig Katzenellenbogen (1877-1943), enabled Piscator in the late 1920s to lease the Theater am Nollendorfplatz. In the early 1920s she worked with Leopold Jessner at the State Theater; critics hailed her performance as Countess Werdenfels in Wedekind's The Marquis of Keith for its "whorish hardness," combined with an intellectual depth that constantly flickered with wideawake eroticism. Her films with Fritz Kortner during the 1920s, such as Haschisch, das Paradies der Hölle (Hashish, the Paradise of Hell), initiated her film career.

   Durieux was the subject of several portrait paintings, most notably by Fanz von Stuck, Emil Orlik, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The Renoir painting now hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum, showing her in the costume for Reinhardt's 1914 production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. In 1933 she escaped arrest (Katzenellenbogen was murdered in a concentration camp) and ultimately found sanctuary in the Croatian capital Zagreb, where she worked as a seamstress. She lived in Zagreb until 1955, when she returned to West Berlin and began a new career as a television actress. In 2004 the city of Berlin opened Tilla Durieux Park near Potsdamer Platz in her honor.