Willy Porth

Wilhelm "Willy" Porth (born November 19, 1864 in Hanover , Kingdom of Hanover ; † April 4, 1932 in Döbeln , German Empire ) was a German stage actor and director .

Live and act

Porth came from a dynasty of stage artists: his grandfather was the actor Friedrich Wilhelm Porth (1800–1874), his father the actor Karl Porth (1833–1905). Karl Porth and Marie Seebach also took over the acting instruction of Willy Porth. On May 2, 1882, he made his acting debut with the role of Pylades in the Goethe drama Iphigenie auf Tauris at the Reichenberg City Theater. Porth began his first permanent engagement the following year at the Altenburg court theater, where he made his debut with Romeo from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet . Two more years later, in 1885, he went to the Hamburg City Theater and celebrated his debut there with the title hero in Kleist's drama The Prince of Homburg . In Brno, where he moved to in 1886, Porth began the season again with Romeo, and the artist made his debut at the Riga City Theater in 1888 with Ferdinand from Cabal and Love . He began this part in 1889 at the Hoftheater in Kassel, to which he belonged for two seasons.

Porth's subsequent stage positions were Königsberg (1891 to 1895), Halle (1895 to 1896), Mannheim (1896 to 1899) and Chemnitz (1899/1900). Porth welcomed the new century at the Graz City Theater before returning to Chemnitz one season later. Later looked at him in Darmstadt. With Nathan in Nathan the Wise , Willy Porth celebrated his 30th anniversary as an actor in Bremen, where he was not only allowed to direct strong roles (such as the Leontes in Shakespeare's Winter Tales ) but also to direct. His last stage stop before the First World War was Dresden (also director here), where his ancestors were already able to celebrate great successes. After the war, Porth hardly tied himself to a fixed stage and gradually withdrew from the profession. "Willy Porth had an excellent speech technique in connection with a clarified manner of representation that rejected a heyday of classical acting art", as it was called in the obituary of the German Stage Yearbook 1933. Willy Porth was married to the singer Thekla Hamik since July 1893.

literature

• Ludwig Eisenberg : Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century . Verlag von Paul List , Leipzig 1903, p. 787 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• German stage yearbook. 44th year 1933, ed. from the Cooperative of German Stage Members. Obituary p. 106.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch 1933, p. 106