Word: bergner
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...this point a sleepy little Jewess of 34 sidled into the room, threw back her leopard-skin coat, pulled a crumpled hat off her short, mousy hair, yawned, sat down. Viennese Actress Elizabeth Bergner, just off the Olympic, was about to give her first U. S. interview...
Four days later she was to appear in Margaret Kennedy's Escape Me Never!, the play in which Actress Bergner first spoke English and in which she took critical London by storm last year. To promote her Manhattan debut, Producer Cochran and the Theatre Guild had dragged out every threadbare cliche known to theatrical ballyhoo. Actress Bergner was billed as a shy recluse, inordinately modest, simple, unaffected, fond of Wiener Schnitzel and dogs. "She works harder than any other member of the company," said one account. "She is the first to arrive at the theatre, and she spends...
Escape Me Never! That her first U. S. audience could not go quite so far as to drape over Elizabeth Bergner's slim shoulders the accumulated mantles of Terry, Duse & Bernhardt was no reflection on her very considerable talents. It does not take much of a play to provide a proper vehicle for an authentic diva. The less dramaturgy there is to distract attention from the star, many a leading lady feels, the better. But Playwright Kennedy's tale about the musical Sangers, a faintly connected sequel to her Constant Nymph, is practically no play at all. Every...
...these circumstances, Elizabeth Bergner's performance is on the order of Monologist Ruth Draper's. She is first seen as an ingenuous gamin, pigeontoed, stealing sweets and spinning an incredible yarn about her eventful life, which includes the experience of motherhood. Then she is the wise little gnome keeping willful Sebastian Sanger, her lover, from taking his brother Caryl's girl. She seems to lose stature, shrivel up with unhappiness as Sebastian's mistreated wife. And her little body expands miraculously with an almost majestic grief in the short scene following her baby's death...
...have are set off to poor advantage by the picture. A tedious hyperbole in which Director Josef von Sternberg achieved the improbable feat of burying Marlene Dietrich in a welter of plaster-of-paris gargoyles and galloping cossacks, it seems all the more inadequate by comparison with Elizabeth Bergner's Catherine the Great...