Christiane Grautoff

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Christiane Lili Grautoff (born April 5, 1917 in Berlin ; † August 27, 1974 in Mexico City ) was a German actress and the wife of the expressionist writer Ernst Toller .

Live and act

Christiane Grautoff was born as the daughter of Otto Grautoff and his wife Erna , née Heinemann, both art historians and translators. She had two older sisters, Barbara and Uta. At the age of 12 she played in Berlin under Max Reinhardt Theater, including in Erich Kästner's Emil und die Detektiven , which he himself had edited for the stage in 1930. Her first film role was in the film Luise, Queen of Prussia . In the Berlin theater scene during the Weimar Republic , she was considered a child prodigy . In 1933, when she refused to participate in the Nazi propaganda film Hans Westmar , she followed the much older Ernst Toller into exile at the age of 16 and married him two years later, on May 20, 1935, in London .

After Toller's suicide in New York in May 1939, Christiane Grautoff went on tour through the USA with the play Wilhelm Tell . The following year she was seen in New York in emigrant performances of Bruno Frank's Storm in a Water Glass . Also in 1940 Grautoff married the writer Walter Schoenstedt . She then retired from acting and found employment in a medical laboratory. In 1948 she appeared again in the theater, this time on Broadway (Lyceum Theater) in Edna Ferbers and George Kaufman's play Bravo . Her children's book The Stubborn Donkey was published a year later .

A little later she moved to Mexico with her daughter Andrea Valeria . She last lived there with three grandchildren, one of whom is the actress and dancer Christianne Gout (* 1973), who celebrated a success in 2000 with the film Salsa & Amor .

Works

  • Werner Fuld & Albert Ostermaier (eds.): The goddess and her socialist: Christiane Grautoff's autobiography - her life with Ernst Toller; with documents on the life story . Weidle-Verlag, Bonn 1996, ISBN 3-931135-18-7 .
  • The Stubborn Donkey. Illustr. Anna Marie Jauss. Aladdin, New York 1949.
  • The Tale That Grew and Grew. Illustr. Anna Marie Jauss. New Yor 1955.

literature

  • Kay Less : "In life, more is taken from you than given ...". Lexicon of filmmakers who emigrated from Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945. A general overview. Acabus Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 . P. 212.
  • Zlata Fuss Phillips: German Children's and Youth Literature in Exile, 1933–1950. Biographies and Bibliographies. Munich 2001, ISBN 3-598-11569-5 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Grautoff, Christiane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grautoff, Christiane Lili (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1974
Place of death Mexico city