Erich Ponto

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Erich Ponto (1945)
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Erich Johannes Bruno Ponto (born December 14, 1884 in Lübeck , † February 4, 1957 in Stuttgart ) was a German actor and director .

Life

Adolescent years

Erich Johannes Bruno Ponto was born on December 14, 1884, the youngest of four children in Lübeck. His mother Ida Albers from Reinbek married Ludwig Ponto, who inherited a manufactory shop from his father Heinrich Ponto. The Pontos were merchants from northern Germany. His parents first lived in Lübeck and then moved to Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. Erich Ponto attended school in Altona.

Study time

First, he began studying pharmacy . Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was one of his university lecturers . Ponto always had the urge to act; He rehearsed classics with friends, took part in literary circles and henceforth developed the characters in his plays. In 1905 he took his provisional exam. From 1905 to 1907 he worked in the Beueler Hirschapotheke . He received his training as an actor from Hans Lackner in 1908.

The stage and film actor

Erich Ponto as Jonathan Peachum in Threepenny Opera

Ponto got his first engagement in 1908 at the Stadttheater Passau , later in Reichenberg / Northern Bohemia (1910/11). In 1916 he married Tony Kresse, with whom he had his daughter Eva Ponto (* 1918, married Doering ) and his son Klaus Ponto (* 1927, also an actor). Erich Ponto was friends with Tony's brothers and went in and out of the Kresse house. From 1914 Ponto played in Dresden , where he lived until 1947. In 1928 Ponto played the role of crook boss Jonathan Peachum in the world premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin .

In 1920 Ponto had his first contact with the film in the short film Hampelmanns Glückstag , which was followed in 1920/1921 by The Geiger von Meißen . It was only with the sound film that Ponto's career as a film actor began in the late 1920s. In the Third Reich he took part in several Nazi propaganda films , including The Rothschilds (1940), Blutsbrüderschaft (1941) and I indict (1941). His role in the film Die Feuerzangenbowle was particularly outstanding , where he, as a stiffened Professor Crey, fell victim to Heinz Rühmann's student pranks. In gynecologist Dr. Praetorius he played the pathologist Professor Speiter. In addition to his numerous film roles, he played theater and commuted between Berlin and Dresden almost every day.

In the 1930s, Ponto was also an occasional voice actor. So he dubbed Charles Laughton as Captain William Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and several times Lionel Barrymore , a. a. in The Lady of the Camellias .

When his house was searched during the National Socialist era , Kollwitz drawings were sought to be confiscated from him . Ponto stated laconically that he still needed these for his work, and so they were put back in the closet.

After the war, Ponto became politically active in his adopted home city of Dresden, where he was very popular. Immediately after the end of the war in 1945 he became the artistic director of the Dresden theater . When the first post-war drama performance with Nathan the Wise took place in Dresden on July 10, 1945 in what was then the parish house " The First Church of Christ, Scientist " (later the "Little House") , Ponto played the title role.

One of his discoveries was the Dresden actor Rolf Ludwig , who had returned from the war as a former air force pilot and auditioned at Ponto. Ludwig wanted to prove his sporting skills and jumped out the window at the end of the audition for his role. It turned out that he had mistakenly assumed the room was on the first floor. However, he jumped from the first floor. When Ludwig was lying on the street with a broken arm, Ponto called out the window: "Young man, you are engaged."

Another of his discoveries for the stage and the film was Gert Fröbe . Frobe had gathered up all the courage to speak to Ponto. He initially waved him off because of Frobe's unmistakable Saxon dialect , but later accepted him as a student. Ponto commented on Gert Fröbe's audition with the words: "Mephisto was not a Saxon."

In 1947 he left Dresden because, as he wrote to colleagues, “he could not play freely in this city if he did not belong to a certain political position”. He got in touch with Curt Goetz , settled in Stuttgart and came to the State Theater in Stuttgart . In 1949 he made the internationally known film The Third Man with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten , in which he played a shady doctor in a supporting role. For the 1950/51 season Heinz Hilpert brought him to the German Theater in Göttingen . He played inter alia, the main role in the farmer a millionaire by Ferdinand Raimund . The Sunday matinée events, organized alternately by Erich Ponto and Heinz Hilpert, were also enjoyable.

In 1952 he was named Württemberg State Actor . For his 70th birthday in 1954, he wanted the title role in Lessing's Nathan the Wise . In 1954 he received the Great Federal Cross of Merit and in 1956 the film ribbon .

Grave of Ponto on the Tolkewitz urn grove

Last years and honors

Ponto often wrote poetry on public and private occasions. In the last years of his life he lived with a former student, the actress Edith Heerdegen (1913–1982). He died on February 4, 1957 in Stuttgart after a long illness that did not prevent him from playing. In 1957 he was already terminally ill in his last movie The Star of Africa . He was first buried in the Stuttgart forest cemetery and later reburied in the Nienstedten cemetery in Hamburg . Today in Stuttgart a street in the Vaihingen district (Erich-Ponto-Weg) and a memorial stone on the grave of the Böhm family (husband of Edith Heerdegen) remember him. Fifty years later, in March 2007, he was reburied in the Tolkewitz urn grove in Dresden . A street in Dresden is also named after him. The Friends of the State Theater Dresden e. Since 1999, V. has been awarding the Erich Ponto Prize for outstanding performance to a member of the ensemble in recognition and in memory of Ponto's long time at the Dresden State Theater. - In 2000 he was voted one of the “100 Dresdeners of the 20th Century” in the daily newspaper “ Dresdner Latest News ”.

Erich Ponto was an uncle of Jürgen Ponto , the board spokesman of the Dresdner Bank who was murdered by RAF terrorists in 1977 .

Filmography (selection)

Radio plays and speech records

Erich Ponto has participated in numerous speech record productions (released today on CD):

literature

Web links

Commons : Erich Ponto  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Anke Vehmeier, Museum window: Ein Kinostar in Beuel , November 11, 2015, Bonner General-Anzeiger
  2. ↑ Erich Ponto in the German synchronous file
  3. ↑ source?
  4. ↑ The Hamburg burial site was closed. knerger.de: The gravesite of Erich Ponto . The commemoration took place on April 18, 2007 in the old crematorium Dresden Tolkewitz: Weekly courier of April 18, 2007.
  5. ↑ 100 Dresden residents of the 20th century . In: Dresdner Latest News . Dresdner Nachrichten GmbH & Co. KG, Dresden December 31, 1999, p. 22 .
personal data
SURNAME Ponto, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ponto, Erich Johannes Bruno (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH 4th February 1957
Place of death Stuttgart