Gerhard Just (actor)

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Gerhard Just , (born July 4, 1904 in Cottbus , † August 5, 1977 in Tübingen ) was a German actor , radio play and voice actor .

Life

Born in Brandenburg, he grew up without a father. When he began to study philosophy after leaving school , he had to break it off for financial reasons in order to support his mother. When he turned to acting he went to Berlin and took lessons from Ferdinand Gregori . He received his first engagement in Esslingen am Neckar . The next stop was Bremerhaven , then he moved back to southern and southwestern Germany. He was u. a. to be seen in Munich , Karlsruhe and at the National Theater Mannheim . But also in Cologne and Hanoverhe had great successes. In the Lower Saxony state capital he appeared in a production by Alfred Roller in the years 1948/49, first in Faust I and later in Faust II in the title role as a powerful and imaginative, ultimately dramatically destroyed Faust. But you could also experience the massive acting actor as a character comedian or a sharp caricature player. A tongue flaw that caused a slight palate lisp never had a disadvantageous effect and was more of a distinctive means of expression.

In 1952 Paul Hoffmann brought him to the Stuttgart State Theater , of which he was a member until the end of his life. His great popularity could be recognized by the fact that he received the obligatory applause every time he appeared on the stage. He played many roles under the direction of Peter Palitzsch , for example with Peter Roggisch in Warten auf Godot by Samuel Beckett . The magazine Theater heute wrote about this performance in issue 9 of the year 1977: And then there was a performance in Stuttgart in which Palitzsch, in cooperation with two actors, masterfully let his difficult sense of reality become effective in a play that until then had been understood as a mysterious parable had been: Beckett's "Waiting for Godot". The two waiting people were just waiting tramps, played by Gerhard Just and Peter Roggisch. Their waiting did not stop there, but was filled with human reality from the process of the manifold relationships between the two waiting people. As clearly and precisely as every phase of this process was demonstrated, every detail remained tender, vulnerable, loving. A serene, sober evening, on which Just's bulkiness and rigidity were refined to the same extent as Peter Roggisch's speed and fluidity of sensation were strengthened and verifiable. The two showed what that is: teamwork.

Gerhard Just, who was appointed state actor on July 14, 1972 by the Baden-Württemberg Minister of Culture Wilhelm Hahn (CDU) , was a very busy actor who studied Latin in his limited free time. Once on November 22, 1975 it happened that he had to appear in three different Stuttgart productions that day : in the afternoon in the Sunny Boys , in the evening as Stravinsky narrator and then in Kleist's Käthchen .

In his later years he was, alongside Hans Mahnke, the dominant old man figure in the state theater. He played the emperor in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn by Heinrich von Kleist , the old men in the Ice Age by Tankred Dorst and the Kumentat in Rheinpromenade by Karl Otto Mühl .

From around the mid-1950s, he also took roles in film and television. In 1960 he played director Gatzka in the 5th part of On the Green Beach of the Spree according to Hans Scholz , who, together with his wife, played by Helen Vita , enters the Berlin "jockey bar" late at night and tells the audience what he thinks of West German post-war policy with regard to West Berlin . This was followed by other larger roles in The Peace of Our City , Who Eats Out of the Tin Bowl After Hans Fallada and The Bad Soldier Smith . He was also featured in an episode of the ZDF series The Fifth Column .

More often, however, he was used as a radio play speaker. Just mainly worked in the SDR studios . Here he appeared in many leading and supporting roles, such as in the multi-part Die Odyssey nach Homer , where he could be heard as Poseidon , as "Dicker" in Die Dicken und die Dünnen or as Thomas Skelton in the detective piece Das Faß .

As a voice actor, he lent Robert Newton in Major Barbara , Anthony Quayle in Hamlet and Mickey Rooney in Teufelskerle his voice.

Gerhard Just, who died on August 5, 1977 in a Tübingen hospital, was buried on August 10 in the Stuttgart-Plieningen cemetery. He was married to the actress Charlotte Schreiber-Just (1914-2000). Their grave is in Section 8, Row 1, No. 12

Filmography

Radio plays (selection)

literature

  • German stage yearbook. 1978.
  • Theater today. Issue 9, 1977, p. 1.
  • Central cemetery administration Stuttgart (life dates and burial site)
  • State Archives Ludwigsburg (award of the title of State Actor)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Just, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, radio play and voice actor
DATE OF BIRTH 4th July 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH cottbus
DATE OF DEATH 5th August 1977
Place of death Tübingen