Gisela advertising district

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Gisela Wer District , also Gisela Werbisek or Giselle Werbisek (born April 8, 1875 in Pressburg , Austria-Hungary , today Bratislava , Slovakia ; † April 10, 1956 in Hollywood , California , United States ) was an Austrian theater , silent and sound film actress .

Life and accomplishments

She began her career at a theater in Pressburg. This was followed by jobs at Viennese theaters. From 1918 she also played in Austrian silent films , such as Die Stadt ohne Juden (1924), and also appeared on entertainment stages and in the Simpl cabaret .

In 1938 she had to emigrate to the United States, where she could only act in small roles on theaters in New York . There she also called herself Giselle Werbisek. This was followed by engagements in film and television, and she starred in Hollywood, among others, in The Bride of the Gorilla (1951).

From an obituary

“She played the 'strange old people' very early on. But her comedy often enough broke out such elementary tragedy that one would stop laughing, and from the beginning her age was not a matter of years, but of a timeless, infinitely wise distance from life: in which she nevertheless placed herself right in the middle. There has never been a second time with such real-blooded, full-bodied figures. [...] It was always life itself that embodied the Wer district, and always with that compelling exemplary quality, at the higher level of which Mrs Breier from Gaya met the old woman from Grund and the Schalanterian grandmother: in the human sense. One could perhaps call her a combination of Hansi Niese and Heinrich Eisenbach , of Wiener Volksstück and ' Budapest ' Posse [...]
She was a great folk actress and a great persona, the Wer district, and a master of nuance. She let the punch lines fall like goose pegs out of the shopping bag. She had a stage presence of absolutely monstrous effect and established it by her mere appearance, by the grotesque overwhelming power of her appearance. And she possessed the infallible magic of personality: to dominate the audience completely (and yet imperceptibly), to turn a house raging with laughter in a matter of seconds and to force the silence of the breathless on it, to tighten the throats of those who were just gasping for air so that they there was no way out but that into tears. [...] In
Hollywood films, the Wer region had to be content with small roles not because they projected too little, but because they projected too much of themselves. It blew up its scenes and blew the strict hierarchy of large fee recipients. "

Filmography (selection)

Audio

  • Hermann Leopoldi (composer, interpreter) et al. : Popular Jewish Artists. Music & entertainment 1903–1936. Vienna. 1 CD, 1 supplement (27 pages). Trikont, Munich 2001, OBV .

literature

  • Birgit Peter: Strange strategies - feminine joke. The actress Gisela Wer district: female / Jewish / Austrian joke. In: Monika Bernold et al. (Ed.): Screenwise. Film, television, feminism. Documentation of the conference “Screenwise. Locations and scenarios of contemporary feminist film and TV studies ”, 15. – 17. May 2003 in Vienna. Schüren, Marburg 2004, ISBN 3-89472-387-4 , pp. 125-130. - Table of contents online (PDF; 275 KB) .
  • 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. ACABUS-Verlag, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86282-049-8 , p. 533 f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Friedrich Torberg : The heirs of Aunt Jolesch: Appendix: Obituaries: Gisela Wer District or Mrs. Breier from Gaya in Hollywood. In: Friedrich Torberg: Die Tante Jolesch and Die Erben der Tante Jolesch (double volume), Verlag Langen / Müller, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7844-3139-0 , pp. 638–640.