Judith Malina

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Judith Malina in Englewood (2014)
Judith Malina (undated)

Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926 in Kiel , † April 10, 2015 in Englewood , New Jersey ) was an American theater and film actress , author and director of German origin. She was a staunch pacifist anarchist and founded the Living Theater with Julian Beck in 1947 .

life and work

In 1928 Malina and her family moved to the USA because her family suspected the impending disaster in Germany (see Dirk Szuszies' film Resist). As the daughter of the chief rabbi of the German-Jewish community in New York, she grew up in a politically active climate. The father organized committees to encourage President Roosevelt to raise or lower the immigration quota. He died when Judith was 14 years old.

As a student at Julia Richman High School in New York, Malina met the painter and then Yale student Julian Beck in 1943 , whom she married five years later. Their marriage was as unconventional as their work: Beck was bisexual and had a male partner, and Malina had a number of lovers. There was no separation between private life, political engagement and art.

Interested in acting from an early age, Malina attended Erwin Piscator's Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1947 . Piscator's conception of a politically involved theater had a lasting impact on Malina's later theater work. Beck also took part in numerous courses in the Dramatic Workshop, but without being formally registered. She was heavily influenced artistically by Valeska Gert , in whose Beggar Bar in New York Malina worked (1943 to 1945) and where she saw performances by Valeska Gert.

Judith Malina and other actors from the Living Theater, 1983

Malina and Beck founded the Living Theater together in 1947, one of the most radical and experimental theater groups in US theater history. It was not until four years later that the first joint productions took place. In their private apartment in New York, Malina and Beck opened a “Theater in The Room” in 1951 with four short plays, including Bertolt Brecht's Der Jasager . In the 1950s the Living Theater was the avant-garde, in the 1960s it was the counterculture. Initially it was mainly the engine of the student and anti-Vietnam war movement , but later its members became involved, for example, in the abolition of the death penalty in the USA and in working with war-traumatized people. The Living Theater often goes to crisis regions in order to find theatrical, peaceful forms of protest together with the local people and to use the means of theater to demonstrate non-violent forms of conflict resolution.

Together with other members of the group, Malina was imprisoned several times in the USA and Brazil during the time of the military dictatorship. There were forced closings and, for financial reasons, the self-dissolution of the Living Theater after Beck's death in 1985, new foundations, European exile from 1964 to 1968, then the return to the USA with their most successful production to date, Paradise Now. In 1972 Malina published her diary entries, The Enormous Despair, from this period, a record of her feelings of danger and unfamiliarity upon returning to the United States.

After Julian Beck died of cancer in 1985, Hanon Reznikov , who was previously a lover of both activists, became the central figure alongside Judith Malina and her future husband.

In order to be able to afford the financial expenses for the group and the theater, Malina played several film roles in Hollywood. Her occasional film career began in 1975 with a small role in Dog Day Afternoon, and later she also played major roles in Addams Family and Household Saints.

Judith Malina (2011)

With the Living Theater she moved to Italy in the late 1990s, where they were given a kind of "asylum"; They also performed in Lebanon in 2000 after the Israeli army withdrew from the occupied territories of the 1982 Lebanon War : an experience that was partly dismaying for Malina and other Jewish members of the Living Theater (see Dirk Szuszies' film Resist).

Malina died on April 10, 2015 at the age of 88 in Englewood, New Jersey, USA, of complications from a lung disease caused by years of smoking .

Awards

In January 2003 Judith Malina was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement .

Works

  • The Enormous Despair. (diaries, 1968-69). Random House, New York 1972
  • with Julian Beck: Paradise Now. Pantheon, New York 1972
  • with Imke Buchholz: Living Theater means life. One who set out to learn life. Volksverlag, Linden 1980
  • with Julian Beck: Il lavoro del Living Theater a cura di Franco Quadri. Ubulibri, Milano 1982
  • The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947–1957. Grove Press, New York 1984
  • Conversazioni with Judith Malina a cura di Cristina Valenti. Edizioni Elèuthera, Milan 1995
  • The Piscator Notebook. Routledge Chapman & Hall, London 2012

Filmography

As an actress

Television appearances

  • 1954: The Goldbergs (TV series, one episode)
  • 1987: Miami Vice (TV series, one episode)
  • 1989: Der Equalizer ( The Equalizer, television series, an episode)
  • 1993: Tribeca (TV series, episode)
  • 1996: Emergency Room ( ER, TV series, an episode)
  • 2006: The Sopranos ( The Sopranos, TV series, an episode)
  • 2013: Over / Under (TV movie)

As a director

  • 1964: The Brig

Self-presentation

  • 1969: Diaries Notes and Sketches
  • 1996: Al Pacino's Looking for Richard
  • 2001: Changing Stages
  • 2001: In the Mirror of Maya Deren
  • 2002: How to Draw a Bunny
  • 2004: Resist! A dream of living with the Living Theater (Resist! To Be with the Living)
  • 2010: New York Memories

As a narrator

  • 1958: Narcissus

See also

Web links

Commons : Judith Malina  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. Routledge Chapman & Hall, London 2012. pp. 124 f.
  2. ^ Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. Routledge Chapman & Hall, London 2012. p. 124
  3. ^ Judith Malina in: A Memoir of Valeska Gert and the Beggar Bar , PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 41, Issue 3, September 2019, pp. 1-16
  4. ↑ Valeska Gert in her autobiography I am a witch. Kaleidoscope of my life , 1968
  5. ^ Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. Routledge Chapman & Hall, London 2012. p. 171
  6. ↑ Bruce Weber: Judith Malina, Founder of the Living Theater, Dies at 88. In: The New York Times, April 10, 2015 (English, accessed April 11, 2015).
personal data
SURNAME Malina, Judith
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theater and film actress, writer and director; Co-founder of the "Living Theater"
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Kiel , Schleswig-Holstein , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 2015
Place of death Englewood, New Jersey