Fini Littlejohn

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Fini Littlejohn (born November 25, 1914 in Vienna , † June 15, 2004 in Malibu / USA , birth name Josefine Vogelbaum, stage names Fini Rudiger and Fini Rudiger-Littlejohn) was an Austrian-American actress and illustrator.

Life

Fini Vogelbaum, who grew up in Vienna, lived in Berlin in the twenties after two years in Nancy / France . In the thirties she returned to Vienna and began studying art at the School of Applied Arts, among others with Albert Paris Gütersloh . She soon came into contact with the theater, for example with the Ernst Lönner group , and was particularly sponsored there by Rudolf Beer , who also invented the stage name Fini Rudiger. She played u. a. in Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening , in Charley's Aunt, and in the Ball at the Savoy . After her first supporting role in the Willi Forst film Masquerade , she hoped for an appropriate career - but she had to emigrate because of her Jewish origins. She went to New York , where a film career was out of the question because of her strong Austrian accent. In California she delivered Scenic Designs for the theater director Ernst Lönner, who is known to her from Vienna, and furnished dance performances by Ernst Matray . In the end, however, she ended up with the film: At Walt Disney , where she designed some minor characters in the almost finished film Pinocchio . This work paved her way into the Disney Character Model and Story Department - which made her one of the first women at Walt Disney to enter a creative artistic position.

In the course of a massive wave of layoffs for economic reasons, Fini Rudiger had to leave Disney in 1941. She then met William "Bill" Littlejohn, the animator of the Tom and Jerry series. She married him in 1944 and took American citizenship. From then on Fini Littlejohn worked as a film decorator, poster artist and children's book illustrator. She remained connected to the animation film through her husband and active membership in the International Animated Film Association . In 1984 Fini Rudiger-Littlejohn, as she called herself since her marriage, organized The Olympiad of Animation as part of the supporting program for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles , a festival of international animated films that is still unique today, in which more than 60 entries from all over the world in several categories were shown.

Fonts

  • First Nursery Songs , Arranged by Leonore Rose Smith, Illustrated by Fini Littlejohn, New York, Garden City Publ. 1945

literature

  • Ursula Seeber [ed.]: Small allies: expelled Austrian children's and youth literature , Austrian library in exile. Vienna: Picus-Verl., 1998 ISBN 3-85452-276-2 . P. 143f
  • 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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ US Naturalization Record Indexes database
  2. ↑ Helmut G. Asper: Something better than death ... , Schüren-Verlag, Marburg 2002
personal data
SURNAME Littlejohn, Fini
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vogelbaum, Josefine (maiden name); Rudiger, Fini (stage name); Rudiger-Littlejohn, Fini
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American actress and illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 2004
Place of death Malibu