Ellen Richter

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Ellen Richter 1928 on a photograph by Alexander Binder

Ellen Richter (born July 21, 1891 in Vienna , † September 11, 1969 in Düsseldorf , Germany ; born Käthe Weiß ) was an Austrian actress and film producer .

Life

She was the youngest of five children from Hungarian Jewish citizens in Vienna. After attending primary school, she took acting lessons from Ferdinand Gregori at the Academy for Performing Arts .

It passed with distinction and performed at the Brno City Theater (1908), the Residenzbühne Vienna (1910) and the Künstlerbühne Munich (1911). In 1912 she played at the Nollendorf Theater in Berlin , where she played Orestes in the operetta The Beautiful Helena .

In 1915, Ellen Richter came to silent films and immediately received leading roles. She became a star of German sensational and adventure cinema. In 1920 she founded the Ellen Richter GmbH with her husband Willi Wolff . Wolff also acted as a screenwriter and director of her films, in which she was always the focus. Often their films were set against an exotic backdrop.

The seizure of power by the National Socialists abruptly ended her successful film career. As an actress, she was banned from appearing and was only able to produce two films as a producer with her company Riton (Ellen Richter Tonfilm GmbH). In 1938 she was excluded from the Reichsfilmkammer . In 1935 she had left Germany with her husband and returned to Vienna. The Wolff couple stayed there until Austria was annexed . After that they stayed in Czechoslovakia. On the run from the German Wehrmacht, they finally emigrated from Lisbon to the USA in December 1940. There Ellen Richter and Willi Wolff settled in New York City .

After Wolff's death at the beginning of a joint trip to Europe in April 1947, Richter returned to Berlin, where she re-established her old company, Ellen Richter Film GmbH . In 1952 she also brought Riton-Film GmbH to life in Baden-Baden .

She spent her twilight years in Düsseldorf, where Wolff's nephew lived, and in Zurich, where she had her retirement home. After her own death, Ellen Richter was buried at her husband's side in Nice .

Filmography

Web links

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. 423 f.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The journalist PEM writes in his "Filmecho" article that she was buried in Zurich.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ellen Richter Film GmbH (Berlin). In: filmportal.de . Deutsches Filminstitut , accessed on October 16, 2016 .
  2. ↑ In the application for naturalization, her husband Willi Wolff indicated Czechoslovakian citizenship. Declaration of Intention, No. 108777, issued in Los Angeles on June 17, 1941. Source: ancestry.com
  3. ^ Ellen Richter Film GmbH, Commercial Register Berlin 93 HRB 6456 NZ
  4. ^ Johann Caspar Glenzdorf: Glenzdorfs international film lexicon. Biographical manual for the entire film industry. Volume 3: Peit – Zz. Prominent-Filmverlag, Bad Münder 1961, p. 1393.
  5. ^ PEM: Ellen Richter, in: Filmecho / Filmwoche, No. 20, year 1971, p. 11.
  6. ↑ The great duchess. Illustrated Film Week 1926, accessed on May 9, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Judge, Ellen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Käthe (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian actress and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 11th September 1969
Place of death Dusseldorf