Sibylla lead

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Sibylla Blei , called Billy Blei , (born March 22, 1897 in Zurich , Switzerland as Maria Eva Sibylla Bley ; † March 14, 1962 in Costa da Caparica , Portugal ) was an Austrian actress , model , translator and ceramicist .

Life & work

Training and debut as an actress

Sibylla Blei was born on March 22, 1897 as the daughter of Franz Blei , who became known as a writer, translator, editor and literary critic, and his wife Maria (née Lehmann), a prospective dentist from Germany. In the years 1898 to 1899 the family of three lived in the United States , especially in Philadelphia , where Maria Blei completed a doctorate in dentistry . The family subsequently returned to Europe and settled in Munich . While her mother, as a dentist, contributed the major part of the household income, Franz Blei was primarily a journalist during this time. Sibylla Blei's brother Peter Maria († 1959) was born on June 17, 1905 in Munich. Previously, the parents who had been in a wild marriage had temporarily not lived together. At the latest after the birth of the second child, her parents went their separate ways. From 1908 to 1912 Billy Blei, as Sibylla Blei was called all her life, visited the Free School Community of Wickersdorf , founded in 1906 in Wickersdorf near Saalfeld / Saale on the eastern edge of the Thuringian Forest . After that she should have completed an apprenticeship as an actress and made her debut on November 13, 1914 at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin , directed by Max Reinhardt . There she worked for two years in various smaller roles and played, among others, the mute confidante in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Elektra or the baroness von Totleben in Frank Wedekind's The Marquis von Keith . In addition, she played the servant Balthasar in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or Grace Phillimore in the comedy Jonathans Töchter by Longdon Michell . She was also seen in plays by Gerhart Hauptmann .

Appearances in theater and film

In the first half of 1917, Blei lived with her family in Vienna, where through her father she came into contact with a large number of intellectuals and cultural workers and also made friends with a number of them. Among them Robert Musil , who wrote her a handwritten dedication in the first volume of his novella The Man Without Qualities . Rudolf Borchardt , who came from Germany, also wrote a handwritten dedication to his essay The War and German Responsibility from 1916. In addition, Borchardt wrote a cycle of his echo poems on Billy Blei in 1917. Hermann Broch , who was a friend of her father, also wrote poems on Sibylla Blei. In the summer of 1918 she belonged to the Front Theater and traveled with it to the Italian front and subsequently to Bosnia and Herzegovina , where she worked on two propaganda films for the Austro-Hungarian war press headquarters.

After her return to Vienna, she was seen here in other, mostly small, theater and film roles. In the opera Die Frau ohne Schatten by Richard Strauss , which premiered on October 10, 1919 at the Vienna State Opera , she was seen in the role of the guardian of the threshold of the temple . In the same year she took on a small role in Ernst Lubitsch's historical film Madame Dubarry and was then in 1921 in Lucifer by director Ernest Juhn , and in 1923 in the supporting role of a maid of honor in the American silent film Scaramouche based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini , the adapted screenplay by Willis Goldbeck and directed by Rex Ingram .

At the same time, Bleis was portrayed by the Viennese painter, graphic artist and fashion designer Erika Abels d'Albert , daughter of the art scholar and writer Ludwig Wilhelm Abels . This painting was then exhibited in Vienna in autumn 1919. Parallel to her acting activities, Blei also works as a translator , translating the story The Priest and the Messner Boy , which has long been attributed to Oscar Wilde and which her father published in 1924 in the volume The Priest and the Messner Boy and other apocryphal tales . Furthermore, Blei also posed as a photo model for fashion magazines, for which the body size described as "unusual" is said to have been predestined. Examples of her modeling activities are the presentation of exclusive hat creations in 1919 in the fashion section in the magazine Moderne Welt , which was edited by Ea von Allesch , with whom Blei was also friends, or the presentation of a female pilot's costume in the Illustrirten Zeitung (1927). She often posed for photos of Trude Fleischmann between the 1910s and 1930s .

Marriage, divorce and emigration to Spain

On February 25, 1926, the then 28-year-old married the industrialist and banker Ernst von Lieben (1875–1970), 22 years her senior , son of Anna von Lieben and brother of Robert von Lieben , for whom it was already the third marriage. The marriage with von Lieben did not last long, however, and was dissolved again in 1928 or 1929, with the former spouses maintaining a friendly relationship. Around 1930, Blei met Sarah Halpern (1898–1974), who came from a distinguished Russian family, who later called herself Sarita and who also worked as a translator. Via Frankfurt, Paris and Madrid she came to Vienna, where she first encountered lead and appeared as a constant companion until she died in 1962. From 1932 the couple lived on Mallorca , where from that year Billy Blei's father Franz, who had emigrated from Austria for financial and political reasons, also lived in the small town of Cala Rajada . She subsequently ran a chicken farm on the Spanish Balearic Island and intended to buy land on a larger scale near her father. She was also interested in buying land in Marbella , southern Spain; Nothing came of either of the planned projects.

Escape from civil war, emigration to Portugal and death

Due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Blei had to flee and returned to Vienna, while her partner, who now appears as Sarita Halpern, settled in the Portuguese seaside resort of Costa da Caparica . In 1938, their lead followed to the seaside resort near Lisbon , where the couple ran a company for the production of natural cosmetics from the following year. The company, which is mainly run by Halpern, advertised products with the brand name Sibylla Lieben . Lead itself was active in Portugal, among other things, with ceramic work . In February 1941 she took in her father, who had fled to Portugal via Vienna, Florence , Lucca , Cagnes-sur-Mer and Marseille after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War . With the help of the aforementioned Hermann Broch, she made it possible for him and mutual friends to emigrate to the United States, where her father died the following year in Westbury , New York State . Her mother also lived with her for a while during the Spanish Civil War, and it was here that she met Franz Blei, with whom she was still married because the two had never been divorced. Soon after, her mother traveled to Germany, where she spent the last months of her life with a niece in Heidelberg , where she died in 1943.

Billy Blei died on March 14, 1962, a few days before her 65th birthday, in Costa da Caparica, where she had lived for over two decades. Her partner died in 1974. After Halpern's death, the Bleis library, counting around 1,000 copies and considered valuable, including the extensive private library of its bibliophile father Franz Blei, was donated to the Biblioteca by her brother, David Halpern Nacional de Portugal , the National Library of Lisbon, where it can still be found today. Another part of the estate is now in the Vienna Library in the City Hall .

Maria Blei wrote a diary for her daughter from 1897 to 1919, which bore the Latin title Mariae Sybillae Diarium . Almost 100 years after the last diary entry, Angela Reinthal published a volume in spring 2018 with the title Maria Blei: Diary for daughter Billy: Your love is wild as the torrent (Manu scripta / Text Archive of Austrian Cultural History, Volume 3) , the big one Includes parts of Blei's diary.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Billy's Diarium , accessed March 3, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Lead, Sibylla
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lead, Billy (nickname); Bley, Maria Eva Sibylla; Bley, Sibylle; Love, Sibylla (brand name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian actress, model, translator and ceramicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Zurich , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1962
Place of death Costa da Caparica , Portugal