Richard Gorter

Richard Gorter , born Richard Kohn (* 20th June 1875 in Munich , German Empire , † 21st January 1943 in Kochel am See , Empire), was a German theater actor , theater director , theater director and playwright .

Live and act

Richard Kohn, son of the director of a construction company, chose the pseudonym Gorter very early on. He received his artistic training in his hometown of Munich with Wilhelm Schneider and played his first theater roles in 1896. His ascent began with the change to the character subject, which he filled from 1902 at the theater in Liegnitz (Lower Silesia). There followed obligations u. a. to the venues in Görlitz, Stettin, Graz and Hanover. Even before the First World War , Gorter was able to direct for the first time as a guest artist - he was seen with Leopold Jessner at the Hamburger Volksbühne and with Tilly and Frank Wedekind at the Münchner Kammerspiele. His early theater roles include Osvald in Ibsen's Ghosts , Dusterer in Anzengruber's folk play Der Gwissenswurm , Mephisto in Goethe's Faust , Count Trast in Sudermann's Die Ehre and Willy Janikow in Sodom's End from the pen of the same author and in several Shakespeare - Roles: Richard III. , Hamlet as well as Iago (in Othello ) and as Shylock (in The Merchant of Venice ).

In 1913 Richard Gorter went to the Breslau Lobe Theater and two years later took over the management of both this and the Breslau Thalia Theater. In this double function he also became a supporter of the acting debutant Heinz Rühmann , who took up his first permanent engagement in 1920 under Gorter's artistic director. In addition to comedies and classics, Gorter's repertoire included plays by Frank Wedekind, who was well known to him from previous joint theater activities, including Pandora's Box and Wetterstein Castle . Evidently eleven Wedekind pieces in 155 performances could be seen under Gorter's direction in Breslau between 1915 and 1921. Gorter finally reached Berlin, where he worked as director of the New Theater am Zoo in the late 1920s. Since the early 1930s Gorter was no longer active in the theater. He retired to the Upper Bavarian Kochelsee and wrote several cheerful plays there, including An Immoral Marriage, Through the Newspaper and the monkey crowd .

literature

• Heinrich Hagemann (Ed.): Specialized lexicon of the German stage members . Pallas and Hagemanns Bühnen-Verlag, Berlin 1906, p. 53.
• Wilhelm Kosch : Deutsches Theater-Lexikon, Biographisches und Bibliographisches Handbuch, first volume, Klagenfurt and Vienna 1953, p. 588

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hagemann mentions the year 1876
2. ^ ^{A b} Franz Josef Görtz, Hans Sarkowicz: Heinz Rühmann: The actor and his century, p. 27. Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2001

Web link

• Short biography in: Heinz Rühmann: The actor and his century