Ruth Niehaus

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Ruth Hildegard Rosemarie Niehaus , married Ruth Lissner (born July 11, 1925 in Krefeld , † September 24, 1994 in Hamburg ), was a German theater and film actress and director .

Grave site of the Niehaus family in Meerbusch-Büderich (2008)

Life

Her parents were Elisabeth Niehaus, geb. Nettesheim, and the engineer Fritz Niehaus. Her brother was the Munich surgeon Helmut Niehaus (1928–1994). Ruth Niehaus grew up in the garden city of Meererbusch , now Meerbusch .

After graduating from the Luisenschule in Düsseldorf , she attended the drama school there under Peter Esser , who taught her for two years and gave her a first-class diploma. She received stage engagements in Krefeld, Oldenburg, Berlin, Basel, Düsseldorf (with Gustaf Gründgens ), Munich, at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg (with Oscar Fritz Schuh ) and at the Burgtheater in Vienna. She was a character actress of both classical and modern theater.

Ruth Niehaus was called "the Rita Hayworth of the German film of the 1950s" and was considered a Miss Wonder . She was one of the great movie stars of the 1950s and was on the covers of Star and Film and Woman . In 1950, she met the US actor Orson Welles in Hamburg , who offered her three leading roles in Hollywood and proposed marriage. To his astonishment, she declined his offer and stayed in Germany. In 1964 she was photographed by photographer Peter Basch in his studio in New York and depicted in his book Junge Schönheit .

Niehaus also worked in radio play productions such as The Three Question Marks and the Scar Face and in Der Bastian as the spokeswoman for Barbara Noack . She also had guest appearances in television shows, u. a. in one will win at Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff (1985) or to the Blue Boar at Heinz Schenk (1982). She was seen as an advertising medium at Rosenthal Porzellan, Lux Seife or Ergee tights.

In 1988 and 1990 she went to China in search of clues to learn more about the life of her deceased husband, the journalist and long-time editor-in-chief of Illustrierte Kristall , Ivar Lissner . She wrote a script about his life that she was able to finish shortly before her death. In 1994 she wanted to take on a television role again; However, because of her illness, this no longer happened.

Ruth Niehaus was the great-aunt of the actress Valerie Niehaus .

Stage engagements

Ruth Niehaus was seen on many large German and Austrian stages as a serious character actress. Her most important roles were Johanna ( The Maid of Orléans ) , Gretchen ( Faust ) , Pippa ( And Pippa dances! ) , Ophelia ( Hamlet ) , Mrs. de Winter, Desdemona ( Othello ) , Medea, Gigi and others. v. a.

Her theater career began in 1947–1948 at the Stadttheater Krefeld , followed by engagements at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg (1948–1949), the Oldenburg State Theater (1949–1950) and with Gründgens in Düsseldorf (1952–1954). In the summer of 1954 she was seen as Gretchen in Heilbronn. In 1955 she was committed to the Hamburger Kammerspiele , she also played on the municipal stages in Wuppertal.

At the festival in Bad Hersfeld she was celebrated as "Das deutsche Gretchen 1959" in Goethe's Faust, directed by William Dieterle . In 1961 and 1962 she also played Titania in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream there, also directed by Dieterle .

In 1959 she played at the Wiener Burg and from 1964 to 1968 with Oscar Fritz Schuh at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. In Hamburg she moved the present author Jean Cocteau to tears with her portrayal of Eurydice in his play Orpheus .

In 1987 Ruth Niehaus celebrated her 40th stage anniversary. She was on stage until 1992. Her most successful time was from 1964 to 1968 at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In 1968 she left the house together with the artistic director Oscar Fritz Schuh and played other roles in his productions. Schuh was one of her closest friends until his death in 1984.

The most important stage roles at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus were:

Film engagements

In 1951 she made her feature film debut in the Curt Goetz film adaptation of Das Haus in Montevideo as the daughter of the main characters embodied by Goetz and his wife Valérie von Martens . In the same year she played alongside OW Fischer and Liselotte Pulver in Heidelberger Romance . A year later she got her first leading role in the drama Rosen bloom auf dem Heidegrab alongside Hermann Schomberg . This unusually dark homeland film , which clearly stood out from the cinema packs of that time, is one of the high points in Niehaus' film career. It is often shown by Goethe Institutes abroad. This was followed by several leading roles in film productions such as Rosenmontag (next to Dietmar Schönherr , directed by Willy Birgel ), In the beginning it was sin (after Guy de Maupassant ), Weg ohne Umkehr (next to Ivan Desny ) (1954 Federal Film Prize) and student Helene Willfuer next Hans Söhnker , Elma Karlowa and Harald Juhnke (after Vicki Baum ). In 1960 she stood in front of the camera in Argentina for the production of Cavalcade .

At the beginning of the 1960s, Niehaus largely withdrew from the film business and only sporadically took on roles in film and television productions such as the Erich Kästner adaptation Fabian , the Tatort episode Miriam and episodes from the television series Der Alte and Sonderdezernat K1 . In 1987 she was seen in the role of Anna alongside Heinz Baumann in the production of Wolfgang Menge and Horst Königstein Reichshauptstadt - private . In 1988 she and Königstein shot the film portrait A King in his kingdom about her long-time friend, HÖRZU founder Eduard Rhein . In 1989, ARD shot a portrait of Ruth Niehaus in the series Frauengeschichten . She played her last role in 1991 in the cinema production by Detlev Buck We can also be different… .

Directorial work

1994 Ruth Niehaus received together with Christa Auch-Schwelk for Documentary Jeffrey - Between Life and Death of the Media Prize of the German AIDS Foundation .

As a theater director, she staged Rebecca at the Münchener Kammerspiele in 1987 .

Private

In 1950 Ruth Niehaus married the journalist and writer Ivar Lissner (1909–1967). In 1951 their daughter Imogen Lissner, today Imogen Jochem, was born. Ruth Niehaus had three grandchildren. The Niehaus-Lissner couple had their first residence in Switzerland, in Chesieres sur Ollon, Les Ecovets, in a chalet at an altitude of 1,300 m, in the immediate vicinity of Jean Anouilh . Ruth Niehaus has also lived in a small apartment in Hamburg's Grindel tower since 1950 . In the Swiss canton of Ticino, she often visited her holiday home in the village of Carona , Casa Ivar, which she moved into in 1959.

Strokes of fate for Ruth Niehaus were the early death of her father in 1950, the death of her husband in 1967, the death of her closest friends Oscar Fritz Schuh in 1984 and Eduard Rhein in 1993. Her brother died three months before her own death.

Ruth Niehaus herself died on September 24, 1994 in Hamburg at the age of 69 as a result of a serious illness. She was buried in Meerbusch-Büderich with her parents. In 1951 Joseph Beuys designed the tombstone for the family grave, which commemorates Ruth Niehaus's father, Fritz Niehaus. Beuys had lived in the house of the Niehaus family in Meerbusch, Am Willer 3, in 1948. The Hamburg architect Hans Jochem designed a grave slab for Ruth Niehaus and her mother Elisabeth Niehaus in 1995 so that the Beuys grave stone remained unchanged. The EUROGA art trail leads directly to the grave of the Niehaus family.

Filmography (selection)

Honors

  • Ruth-Niehaus-Strasse in Meerbusch; Inaugurated on September 24, 2014, the 20th anniversary of the artist's death. Valerie Niehaus , Konrad Adenauer (Junior), Angelika Mielke-Westerlage and Matthias Jochem paid tribute to Ruth Niehaus in their speeches to 50 guests.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Note: Some sources (e.g. imdb ) mention 1928 as the year of birth.
  2. ↑ Susanne Robbert: Ruth Niehaus: I want to live more life. In: The time . October 23, 1987 ( online behind a paywall ).
  3. ↑ Werner Föll, Heilbronn City Archives (ed.): Chronicle of the City of Heilbronn: 1952-1957. Heilbronn City Archives, 1995, p. 208.
  4. ↑ Tobias Kemberg: Gretchen, Missy and Ophelia. In: Westdeutsche Zeitung. September 5, 2014, accessed July 11, 2020.
  5. ↑ Marcel Romahn: Meerbusch: First street named after the actress. In: RP-Online. September 25, 2014, accessed July 11, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Niehaus, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Niehaus, Ruth Hildegard Rosemarie (full name); Lissner, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater and film actress and director
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Krefeld
DATE OF DEATH September 24, 1994
Place of death Hamburg