Gertrude Berg

Gertrude Berg as Molly Goldberg in 1951

Gertrude Berg in House of Glass

Gertrude Berg ( October 3, 1899 as Gertrude Edelstein in East Harlem , New York City - September 14, 1966 in Manhattan , New York City, United States ) was an American actress , screenwriter and producer. She was a pioneer of radio. When their serial dramedy The Rise of the Goldbergs (on dt .: The Rise of the Goldbergs ) (1929), later as The Goldbergs known , celebrated its premiere, Berg was one of the first women to be both conceived a long-lived radio program, wrote and produced as well as participated in it. Expression of their success was u. a. winning the Tony Awards and the Emmy Awards for Best Actress.

life and career

Gertrude Berg was born in 1899 as Tillie Edelstein in East Harlem , New York . Her parents Jacob and Diana Edelstein came from Russia and England .

Tillie lived with her family on Lexington Avenue and married Lewis Berg in 1918; they had two children: Cherney (1922–2003) and Harriet (1926–2003). She got to know the theater while she was staging sketches and parodies in her father's holiday resort in the Catskill Mountains , the so-called "Bortscht Belt" in Fleischmanns, New York.

After the sugar factory where her husband worked was destroyed in a fire, she developed a semi-autobiographical sketch series for a radio show. In it she portrayed a Jewish family in an apartment building in the Bronx . Although there was a typewriter in the household, Berg wrote the script for the show by hand and took the pages with her to her appointment with NBC . When the editor she met there complained that he could not read the handwritten manuscript , she read it aloud to him. Their performance not only sold the idea for the radio show, but also brought Berg the lead role in the radio show. Berg continued to write the manuscripts of the show by hand as long as the show was on the transmitter.

On November 20, 1929, The Rise of the Goldbergs aired its first 15-minute broadcast on NBC radio. Berg started out on a fee of $ 75 a week. Less than two years later, in the middle of the Great Depression, she had the show's sponsor propose a fee - he replied, “Mrs. Berg, we can't pay you a cent over $ 2,000 a week. "

Berg was perceived as inseparable from the character Molly Goldberg, the big-hearted matriarch whose family moved from the Bronx to Connecticut as a symbol of the upward trend for Jewish Americans. Her characters raised awareness of Jewish immigration to the USA with their daily stories. Many families were able to understand the aspects of immigrant life and the struggles of the Goldberg family from their own experience during this time.

Berg wrote virtually all of the radio broadcast's more than 5,000 episodes plus a Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly (1948).

After some persuasion, Berg managed to get her series The Goldbergs on television on CBS in 1949 . She won the first Emmy Award for a Leading Actress in a Comedy Series in the first year of the television series on CBS . She had played this role for 20 years in a row at this point - the television show was produced for another five years.

The series The Goldbergs got into trouble during the McCarthy era in 1951: fellow actor Philip Loeb, who played Molly's husband, who played Patriarch Jake Goldberg, was blacklisted . The show was stopped because Loeb was absent and continued without him until 1954 after a year off.

In 1959 Berg won the Tony Award for Best Actress for her performance in the play A Majority of One .

Berg was also a songwriter . Country music singer Patsy Cline sang Berg's composition "That Wonderful Someone" on Cline's debut album in 1957.

Berg died of heart failure in Manhattan on September 4, 1966 at the age of 66.

Web links

Commons : Gertrude Berg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Gertrude Berg in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Randy Bridges: Patsy Cline [MCA]. In: allmusic.com. September 30, 2017. Retrieved April 10, 2019 (American English). 
2. ^ Gertrude Berg, Molly of 'The Goldbergs,' Dead; Actress Wrote and Starred in Popular Radio-TV Series . In: The New York Times . September 15, 1966, ISSN  0362-4331 ( online [accessed April 10, 2019]).