Ernst Morgan

Ernst Morgan , born as Ernst Morgenstern , (born August 19, 1902 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † 1957 in New York City , United States ) was an Austrian actor , singer , author , set designer and cabaret artist .

Live and act

Paul Morgan's brother, who was 16 years younger than him, played on numerous German theaters during the Weimar Republic . He worked at the Hanover Opera and then at Berlin's cabaret. In the 1926/27 season he was seen at the Berlin Schloßparktheater, from 1928 in the "Cabaret of the Impossible" and in the 1931/32 season at the Metropoltheater. Ernst Morgan celebrated successes several times in Erik Charell's revues . Since the mid-1920s, there have also been smaller offers from film. There, the Viennese mostly embodied lively types in cheerful everyday pieces.

Like his brother Paul, Ernst Morgan decided to return to Austria in 1933 in view of the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism by the new Reich government under Adolf Hitler . In Vienna he appeared again at the theater, first in La Scala and finally, at the beginning of 1938 in Die Schöne Helena at the Stadttheater alongside Mira Zarewa and Max Willenz . Morgan celebrated success with small roles in operettas such as Paul Abrahams Die Blume von Hawaii , Johann Straussen's Der Zigeunerbaron and Der Orlow by Bruno Granichstaedten . In 1934, obligations also took him to Prague. Ernst Morgan also worked as a writer, and his operetta A Girl from Vienna was premiered in Salzburg in 1937 with music by Erwin Frim. After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in March 1938, Ernst Morgan fled to Portugal , unlike his brother Paul, who fatally stayed in Vienna and died that same year as an early victim of the Holocaust in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Ernst Morgan ran the Teatro Maria Vitória in Lisbon.

In 1940 he traveled on via Athens, where he was seen in productions of revues at the Teatron Argyropoulos, in 1941 to Cairo. With the advance of Rommel's troops, he and his wife Elisabeth, a daughter of Carl Pfann , fled to Haifa (British Mandate Palestine) in mid-1942. There he found employment with appearances in the Casino Bat Galim. In January 1943, the Morgan couple returned to Cairo. There he opened his own French-language cabaret “La Cigale” (The Cicada), appeared in the Waterloo Club in February 1944 and found employment in various positions (as an actor, screenwriter and set designer) at the Egyptian film studio Misr. His film roles required mostly wheel-breaking, comical types, and he completed his first major Egyptian role (in English) in the fall of 1945 in the film "Five Pounds". Elisabeth Morgan was also active in film during those years and was repeatedly used as a European on duty. On the side, Ernst Morgan earned extra income as an Egypt correspondent for the New York-based exile magazine Aufbau .

When the Egyptian government wanted to force the remaining foreign emigrants out of the country shortly after the end of the war in 1945, Morgan tried to obtain a visa for the United States for the sake of his wife, who, unlike him, categorically ruled out a return to Vienna. Several letters of appeal for help to the writer Friedrich Torberg , who lives in the USA, have been received. It wasn't until the late spring of 1947 that the couple finally managed to move to America. Here, however, Ernst Morgan could hardly find any connection to the artistic scene. a. in autumn 1947 appearances in the émigré cabaret on the side of Gisela Wer district and Oskar Karlweis . He wrote a few smaller articles to help build it up and fell ill with pemphigus , a painful skin disease. Most recently, Ernst Morgan was a cashier at the Baltimore Hotel in New York. His death in 1957 was hardly noticed.

Filmography

• 1926: The sweet girl
• 1929: Revenge for Eddy
• 1929: Once upon a time there was a hussar
• 1929: You give yourself roses when you are in love
• 1930: The jumping jack
• 1930: He or I
• 1931: The woman - the nightingale
• 1931: Who takes love seriously?
• 1931: The Hieflau water devils
• 1932: Three from the stamp office
• 1932: The Feldherrnhügel
• 1932: Dashed the bill
• 1945: El khamsa guinea / Five Pounds

literature

• Marie-Theres Arnbom: Have you ever been in love with me ?. Film stars, operetta favorites and cabaret greats between Vienna and Berlin. Chapter: Ernst Morgan. Polyglott and Komiker, pp. 189 to 205.Böhlau-Verlag Wien-Köln-Weimar 2006.
• 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. 596.
• Morgan, Ernst , in: Frithjof Trapp , Bärbel Schrader, Dieter Wenk, Ingrid Maaß: Handbook of the German-speaking Exile Theater 1933 - 1945. Volume 2. Biographical Lexicon of Theater Artists . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11375-7 , p. 679

Web links

• Ernst Morgan in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Ernst Morgan at filmportal.de