Gabriel Pascal

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Gabriel Pascal (born June 4, 1891 in Arad , Austria-Hungary , now Romania ; † July 6, 1954 , New York , USA ) was a Hungarian producer , director , screenwriter and actor , who is particularly known for film adaptations of the works of George Bernard Shaw made a name.

Career

According to his wife Valerie Pascal, Pascal had no precise knowledge of his origins, but could only remember growing up without a family, at times among "gypsies" after he was taken away from a burning house as a small child. The only memory of his parents was the voice of a woman who shouted “Save Gabor” during the fire. He also remembered that after his time with the gypsies he was brought to a house and introduced him to a woman as his mother which, however, denied this to him.

At the age of seventeen he was placed in a military school in the Hungarian Holics by a "mysterious Jesuit" according to Valeries, which he is said to have left again due to a lack of inclination and aptitude for the military profession to take acting lessons instead, first in Hamburg, where he settled added the name Gabriel Pascal as an artist name, and then in Vienna, where he allegedly trained at the Burgtheater .

In the First World War he is said to have participated as a cavalry officer in a hussar regiment, then tried in vain to work as an actor in Berlin and, with the help of the aforementioned Jesuit, finally attended an agricultural academy in Copenhagen. During this time he was allegedly discovered by a film team with Asta Nielsen and her husband Urban Gad for the silent film, initially stayed with this team and then worked as a director, actor and producer in Italy. During a stay on the French Riviera, he claims to have met George Bernard Shaw for the first time through a chance encounter, whom he was later able to persuade in London to agree to the filming of one of his plays again, despite bad experiences with previous film projects, and even to agree to it to participate as a screenwriter. The result, the film adaptation of Pygmalion: The Novel of a Flower Girl (1938), which was followed by other less successful film adaptations with Shaw's collaboration ( Major Barbara , 1941; Caesar and Cleopatra , 1945), established Pascal's fame in international film, and the correspondence, which arose in the long collaboration with Shaw from the time the first contract was signed in 1935 until Shaw's death in 1950, has remained an important document for Shaw research because Shaw is there in detail, as otherwise only in the correspondence with his Austrian translator Siegfried Trebitsch, Insights into his literary intentions and into his understanding of the characters of his plays.

Filmography

literature

  • Valerie Pascal: The Disciple and His Devil: Gabriel Pascal and Bernard Shaw . Joseph, London 1971, ISBN 0-7181-0726-8
  • Bernard F. Dukore (Eds.): Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal . University of Toronto Press, Toronto [u. a.] 1995 (= Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw, Volume 1), ISBN 0-8020-3000-9
  • 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. P. 388 f., ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Pascal, Gabriel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lehöl, Gabor (maiden name); G. Pasqual
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian producer, director, screenwriter and actor
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Arad, Austria-Hungary, now Romania
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1954
Place of death new York