Otto Beck (actor)

Otto Beck (born September 18, 1857 in Munich ; † July 13, 1942 there ) was a German theater actor .

Life

Beck, the son of a court theater dresser, was supposed to be a tailor like his father. But when he was barely 14, he preferred to be an actor because of his father's job, often in the theater. At first he managed to find accommodation as an extra in the court theater, where he was used as a page, servant, etc.

However, after a short time he left Munich with a traveling company and worked for them not only as a young lover, but also as a theater master, cloakroom and even as a note bearer.

After a few years he was hired as a bon vivant in Graz. In 1881 he joined the Association of the Vienna City Theater, but was hardly employed because of the great competition, so that he immediately accepted a position offered by Max Hofpauer . He traveled to Germany again before he came to a brief engagement at the Ostend Theater in Berlin, which was followed by a position at the Residenztheater Berlin. Since he was neglected here, he went to Leipzig and in 1886 to the Cologne City Theater, where he - with an interruption in 1891 as a member of the German Theater Berlin - worked until at least 1902. In the same decade he can be traced back to the Altenburg theater . Around ten years earlier, in 1898, Otto Beck had celebrated his 25th stage anniversary.

Beck's great theatrical successes include the leading roles in colleague Crampton , The Perjurer , Narcissus and Lumpazivagabundus .

Whether he is identical to a Beck who was appointed court counselor during the imperial era , who worked as a theater director at the Bonn City Theater before the First World War and as director and director at the Munich Volkstheater after the war (in the early 1920s) , cannot currently be verified. This Otto Beck was listed in the register of the German stage yearbooks until the early days of the Hitler dictatorship as a guest artist and senior director (both without permanent engagement).

literature

• Ludwig Eisenberg : Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century . Verlag von Paul List , Leipzig 1903, p. 70, ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• Wilhelm Kosch : Deutsches Theater-Lexikon, Biographisches und Bibliographisches Handbuch, first volume, Klagenfurt and Vienna 1953, p. 99