Ruth Leuwerik

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Ruth Leuwerik (* April 23, 1924 as Ruth Leeuwerik in Essen ; † January 12, 2016 in Munich ) was a German actress . She was one of the great German cinema stars of the 1950s and formed a popular screen couple with Dieter Borsche .

Life

She came as the daughter of the businessman Julius Martin Leeuwerik and his wife Luise, geb. Sokolowski, born in Essen and attended the Viktoriaschule there and the Freiherr-vom-Stein-Gymnasium in Münster . She later worked as a typist and took private acting classes.

She received her first engagements at the Westphalian State Theater in Paderborn and at the Münster Municipal Theaters . From 1947 to 1949 she played at the Theater Bremen and at the Theater Lübeck , from 1949 to 1953 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In the 1950/51 season she also appeared in the play Intermezzo by Jean Giraudoux at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin. She played her last stage role in 1955 as Eurydice in the play of the same name by Jean Anouilh at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus .

She made her screen debut in 1950 in the comedy Thirteen Under One Hat , in which she played one of the leading roles alongside Volker von Collande and Inge Landgut . She stood in for a sick colleague. In 1951 Ruth Leuwerik dubbed Maureen O'Hara in Reef Pirates . Through the agency of an acquaintance, she was introduced to Dieter Borsche , who helped her to get her first major role as a film partner in the comedy Father Needs a Wife in 1952 . Due to the success at the box office, both then shot the film Die große Temptation , which was based on a popular serial novel in a German magazine. Thanks to the success of both films, Ruth Leuwerik and Dieter Borsche, who later also stood in front of the camera in Royal Highness and Queen Luise , became one of the screen couples of the 1950s alongside Sonja Ziemann / Rudolf Prack and Maria Schell / OW Fischer .

Leuwerik had her breakthrough in 1953 when she was present in four cinema productions. In addition to the melodrama A Heart Gets Wrong , in which she was seen for the first time with OW Fischer, she played the leading role in the comedy Must one get divorced right away? , the literary film adaptation of Royal Highness based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann and the family saga Geliebtes Leben , which describes the development of a woman over various decades. For her performance in this film, she was awarded the silver film ribbon in 1954 as best leading actress . At this point in her career, the actress was so often involved in costume films such as Geliebtes Leben and Ludwig II with OW Fischer that her appearances in crinoline and hoop skirt soon became something of a trademark. She often stood for adaptations of literary material such as Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest , who was filmed under the title Rosen im Herbst with Leuwerik in the lead role, and in the title role of Dorothea Angermann based on the eponymous play by Gerhart Hauptmann in front of the camera.

Ruth Leuwerik's career, which had lost some of its momentum in the mid-1950s, was given new impetus thanks to the extremely popular films The Trapp Family and The Trapp Family in America by Wolfgang Liebeneiner around the Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp . The prisoner-of-war drama Taiga, in which she plays a courageous doctor in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, was also directed by Liebeneiner . Part of their popularity, especially with female moviegoers, was probably due to the fact that Leuwerik often portrayed independent, professionally successful women with their own ideas and conceptions of life, as in the comedy The Ideal Woman from 1959.

At the beginning of the 1960s, however, their popularity began to wane: In Liebling der Götter about the life of UFA star Renate Müller , Leuwerik knew how to impress with his acting; the ambitious film biography fell short of expectations in terms of box office results. The Käutner film adaptation Die Rote from 1962 based on the novel of the same name by Alfred Andersch, however, failed to inspire either critics or audiences. After the remake of The House in Montevideo at the side of Heinz Rühmann , Leuwerik withdrew from the screen for several years in 1963. However, she occasionally appeared in television productions, such as in Franz Peter Wirth's television multipart Die Buddenbrooks , in which she embodied the consul Betsy Buddenbrook . In 1978 she was honored with the film band in gold for her many years of outstanding work in German film .

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 2004, the Filmmuseum Berlin dedicated a large retrospective to her under the title The Ideal Woman - Ruth Leuwerik and the Cinema of the Fifties . Her work was honored as follows:

"In her film roles, she knew how to embody a modern self-image against old stereotypes - unlike the widespread prejudice about 'Grandpa's cinema' of the Adenauer era."

In 1949 Ruth Leuwerik was briefly married to the actor Herbert Fleischmann and from 1965 to 1967 with the singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau . Until her death, she lived with her third husband, the ophthalmologist Heinz Purper (1920–2016), in seclusion in Munich.

Grave of Ruth Leuwerik and husband Heinz Purper, Nymphenburg Cemetery, Munich

There she died on January 12, 2016 at the age of 91. In addition to the family, the actor Rolf Kuhsiek, the cultural advisor Hans-Georg Küppers and Thomas Goppel also took part in the memorial service in the Protestant Stephanus Church in Nymphenburg . She found her final resting place in the Nymphenburg cemetery in the Neuhausen-Nymphenburg district of Munich .

Filmography

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Appearances as an actress

  • 1963: Hedda Gabler
  • 1965: Ninotschka
  • 1970: The wide open country
  • 1974: The Commissioner (crime series, episode Der Segelbootmord )
  • 1976: my best friend
  • 1978: Derrick (crime series, episode An Ambush )
  • 1979: The Buddenbrooks (11-part television series)
  • 1980: Rabbit in a hat and other stories with Martin Held
  • 1983: Derrick (episode The perpetrator sent flowers )

More television work

  • 1955: what am I? (TV series, as guest of honor)
  • 1965: Ruth Leuwerik (documentation)
  • 1969: Stars in the ring (contributor to the Krone circus)
  • 1976: Dalli Dalli (TV game show - as a candidate)
  • 1981: Please turn the page (documentation within the magazine)
  • 1997: I think of Germany ... - The whisper in the mountain of things (documentation)
  • 2005: film legends. German (documentation)
  • 2008: Heimat - Your Films: The Dream of Paradise (Documentary)
  • 2009: Ruth Leuwerik tells (short documentation)

Awards and honors

Ruth Leuwerik's star on the Boulevard der Stars in Berlin

literature

  • Klaus Belli: Ruth Leuwerik (= film portraits, volume 2). Olzog, Munich / Cologne 1957, DNB 451562569 .
  • Walter Grieder : Ruth Leuwerik. Great career with small obstacles . Landschäftler / Böhringer, Liestal / Wunsiedel 1962, DNB 451659643 .
  • Peter Mänz, Nils Warnecke (ed.): The ideal woman. Ruth Leuwerik and the cinema of the fifties . On the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Filmmuseum Berlin, April 29 to August 15, 2004. Henschel, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89487-482-1 .
  • Christoph Dompke: Ruth Leuwerik in: “ And Jimmy went to the rainbow ” (1971) , p. 131, in: Old women in bad films: from the end of great film careers. Expanded and completely revised new edition, Männerschwarm, Hamburg 2012 (earlier edition: Weil but what remained , 1998), ISBN 978-3-86300-114-8 .
  • Jonathan Schilling: Prussia again in the film. On images of Prussia in films with Ruth Leuwerik, in: Research on Brandenburg and Prussian History , NF, 29th vol., 2019, H. 1–2, pp. 201–221.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ 50s film star Ruth Leuwerik dies. dpa, January 12, 2016, accessed on August 3, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Ruth Leuwerik , The History of German Films from 1947 to 1973
  3. ^ Films with Ruth Leuwerik , Kinoaktuell, September 2016, p. 29
  4. ↑ Interview with Ruth Leuwerik from 1984 at dw.de, accessed on March 17, 2014.
  5. ↑ quoted according to the German Filmmuseum ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / osiris2.pi-consult.de
  6. ↑ Philipp Crone: Warm-hearted, modest, elegant . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2016, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on February 10, 2018]).
  7. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Ruth Leuwerik
personal data
SURNAME Leuwerik, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leeuwerik, Ruth (maiden name); Leeuverik, Ruth; Purper, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH January 12, 2016
Place of death Munich