Friedrich Basil

Friedrich Basil

Friedrich Hans Basilius Basil , also Fritz Basil , actually Friedrich Meyer (born May 16, 1862 in Frankfurt an der Oder , † March 31, 1938 in Munich ) was a German theater actor , director and acting teacher.

Life

The pastor's son had already played theater in village barns as a teenager - as a layman in plays, some of which he wrote himself. He studied philosophy in Tübingen , Munich and Berlin , but since his seventh semester began to devote himself more and more to acting professionally. During his studies in 1883 he became a member of the Tübingen fraternity Derendingia . Guido was his first role in the Leisewitz tragedy " Julius von Tarent " in the Heinrich Laube theater association in Berlin.

During the semester break in the summer of 1886, he continued his professional acting career at the Kurtheater von Hitzacker , and then took short acting lessons from Königl. Court actor Heinrich Oberländer and finally took up his first permanent engagement on October 1, 1886 at the Lübeck City Theater. His debut part was the Marquis Posa in Schiller's Don Carlos .

After a year, Basil moved to the court theater in Oldenburg , before he returned to the German capital in 1889 to fulfill an obligation at the Berlin theater . He made his highly acclaimed debut there as Recke Siegfried in Die Nibelungen . The poet, (travel) journalist, book author and critic Eugen Zabel commented on Basil's performance: “B. is a technically well-trained artist in spite of his youth, but the main thing remains that he has a winning freshness and naturalness of the sensation on which he can rely has not yet put any theater dust . ”And:“ In any case, B. is, as the French say: 'A trouvaille', also in the appearance that corresponds to our terms youthful German heroism ”.

In addition to heroic roles, Basil also covered the humorous subject, also since he moved to the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1891, where he cried with Bitaud in Die Eine, die Another laughs made his debut. A little later he was also seen as Der Erbförster in Otto Ludwig 's play of the same name .

In 1894, Basil followed a call to the court theater in Munich, where he made his debut as a friar in Lessing's Nathan the Wise . From then on, Munich became his new home until his death 44 years later. At this venue, Basil's career took off considerably; he embodied the Gangl Dötsch in " Der Roßdieb von Fünsing " and the Winkelmann in " The Butterfly Battle " , but also Claudius in Hamlet and Egmont in the Goethe play of the same name . Other court theater roles included Kröger in “ Jugend von heute ” and Benedikt in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing . Occasionally he was able to prove his skills as a singer, especially in Faust I and Faust II .

In May 1896 he was also employed as a director at the court theater; since then Fritz Basil has worked at this venue - part of the Bavarian State Theater after the First World War - in both professional fields.

Basil's trips to film were very sporadic. He was seen above all at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, in the early 1920s, in some less important cinema productions by Munich companies under local directors such as Hans Oberländer and Franz Seitz senior .

When Basil - meanwhile long since appointed chamber actor and in the position of senior director - turned 70, a festival performance of Shakespeare's Was ihr wollt was performed in his honor , in which Basil played the Junker Tobias.

His younger brother was the opera singer and actor Hans Basil .

Basil as an acting teacher

Basil trained a number of actors, especially during the Weimar Republic , including Heinz Klingenberg , Hedda Forsten , Iwa Raffay and, the most famous of them all, Heinz Rühmann . The writer Frank Wedekind also took acting lessons there. A few months after Rühmann (1919), Basil also instructed a young politician in facial expressions, gestures and rhetoric: Adolf Hitler . Photographs made soon afterwards with what would later become the “Führer” were used by the young Nazi agitator, who was still largely inexperienced as a political speaker, to rehearse certain dramatic poses in his flaming speeches that were entirely aimed at external effects.

Filmography

• 1920: Do not judge
• 1920: Demon woman
• 1921: The stab in the back
• 1923: The Fate of Thomas Balt ( The Way to God )

literature

• Ludwig Eisenberg's Great Biographical Lexicon of the German Stage in the XIX. Century. List, Leipzig 1903, p. 51 f. .
• German stage yearbook. Vol. 44, 1933, ISSN  0070-4431 , p. 85.
• Wilhelm Kosch : German Theater Lexicon. Biographical and bibliographical manual. Volume 2: Hurka - Pallenberg. Kleinmayr, Klagenfurt et al. 1960, p. 1454: Friedrich Meyer .
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 38–39.

Web links

• Friedrich Basil in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Membership directory of the Derendingia fraternity in Tübingen. October 1933, p. 20.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Ludwig Eisenberg's Large Biographical Lexicon of the German Stage in the XIX. Century. List, Leipzig 1903, p. 51.