Horney, Brigitte

(1911-1988)

   Actress. Horney was one of several talented and beautiful actresses whom Joseph Goebbels and others in the Nazi cultural hierarchy favored. Unlike many of the stars during the Nazi period, though, she survived the war with her career intact and unblemished. Horney also benefited, unwittingly, from the reputation of her mother, noted psychologist Karen Horney (1885-1952), who established a flourishing practice in New York by the mid-1930s. When she was 19, Horney received the Max Reinhardt Prize, awarded to young performers with promise for the stage. She disappointed few observers thereafter, working regularly in Berlin. Horney concentrated on theater work until 1934, when she began working extensively in movies. During the Nazi period, she made more than two dozen movies, perhaps most notably with Joachim Gottschalk (1904-1941), who committed suicide rather than divorce his Jewish wife. With Hans Albers in 1943, she played the tsarina Catherine the Great in Münchhausen (1943).

   Immediately after the war, Horney worked in Basel, Zurich, and Constance with Heinz Hilpert, later joining him in Göttingen as a member of his company from 1953 to 1956. There, she played the title role in Hilpert's premiere of Carl Zuckmayer's Ulla Winblad, among several others. In the mid-1950s she moved to Boston, where her husband was the curator of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The final phase of her career developed in the 1960s, when she began working extensively in West German television. Among her numerous credits in that medium were Aunt Polly in the German-language series based on Mark Twain's novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.