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Maria Orska
Truus, Bob & Jan too! posted a photo:
German postcard by Photochemie, no. K 120. Photo: Alex Binder, Berlin.
Maria Orska (1893-1930) was a Russian-Jewish actress of the German stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s.
On 16 March 1893 Maria Orska was born Effi Rahel Blindermann in Nikolayev, Russian Empire (now Mikolaiv in Ukraine). She was the cousin of the German actress Hedda Forsten and by her mother parented to the theatre impresario Eugen Frankfurter. Although she originally wanted to study law like her father wanted to, she became a stage actress and was discovered by the German actor and drama teacher Ferdinand Gregori when in St. Petersburg. In 1909 he brought her to Vienna's conservatory "k.u.k. Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst" (today Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), led by him. In 1910, she followed Gregori to the Mannheim court theater where she debuted as "Daisy Orska" and soon drew attention to herself in plays by Strindberg and Schnitzler. In 1911 she came to the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where quickly she became the star of the company. In the season 1914/1915 Maria Orska, her stage name by now, moved to Berlin, where she performed at the "Theater in der Königgrätzer Straße" (today "Hebbel-Theater") as well as Max Reinhardt’s Berlin stage. In the same year Edith Andreae was introduced to her, with whom she held a longlasting friendship.
In Berlin the exiled Russian artist became known as interpreter of the works by modern playwrights such as Wilde, Strindberg, Schnitzler, Wedekind and Pirandello. She was a huge success in Wedekind’s Lulu in 1917. "She had sharp, piercing tones, the uncanny effect of which the little character fanatically exaggerated. She also cultivated mundane roles, in which she unfolded the pointed humours of a devious character ... In the field of erotic representation she dared to go remarkably far. She was not an elementary artist, but she had individual qualities that made her the darling of the audience“, the reporter and author Emil Faktor noted in the Berliner Börsen-Courier (16.05.1930) in occasion of her tragic death.
Since her marriage to her second husband, Baron Dr. Hans von Bleichröder jun. (1888 - 1938), a grandson of the Jewish banker Gerson von Bleichröder, the ambitious Maria Orska maintained an elaborate lifestyle. For a long time, she was at the center of so-called Berlin society, and also knew how to stage herself in private as an eccentric spectacle. Her popularity was reinforced by cinema. In 1915 she began a second career as a silent film actor and soon received top salaries. Maria Orska gave her screen debut at the Greenbaum-Film GmbH in Richard Oswald's melodrama Dämon und Mensch (Demon and Man, 1915) and played the shady Lina, who wants to take a cleansed criminal (Rudolf Schildkraut) away from the path of virtue. Maria Orska worked for the first time with the filmmaker and director Max Mack (1884 - 1973) in Das tanzende Herz (The Dancing Heart, 1916), which effected in a six-part Maria Orska film series for the cinemas in 1916/17, with Orska herself as protagonist in each film. The star was praised as "the unmatched interpreter of Strindberg's women, the most fashionable actress of today's Berlin". She was the representative of an "art entirely dedicated to nerves" (Der Film, no. 23, 01.07.1916). As a girl from the gutter she presented herself in Der Sumpf (The Gutter, 1916), but also in comedies such as Die Sektwette (The Champagne Bet, 1916) she was able to win the audience for herself.
But it was mostly the melodramas of those years in which Maria Orska performed the type of the wicked woman. After the dramatic film Adamant's Letztes Rennen (Adamant’s Last Race, 1917) and Der lebende Tote (The Living Dead, 1917), she was for Max Mack Die schwarze Loo (Black Lu, 1917), a gypsy woman who becomes the talk of the town, and who almost wrecks the marriage of a musician (Bruno Kastner). Director Max Mack abducts his audience into the dazzling half-world of the imperial capital. The acclaimed Maria Orska acted as Black Lu, who is constantly surrounded both in the demimonde world and high society. Between push dancing and amorous intrigue, the film develops its highly dared action for those days in expressive images and pointed situations, in which with remarkable determination the stern morality of the late German Imperial Empire is shaken.
Die schwarze Loo was the last part of the Maria -Orska-series, which Mack realized for the Greenbaum-Film. Then Maria Orska paused from the film business and focused on her work at the theater for the next three years. In 1920 she reappeared on screen in the film Die letzte Stunde (The Last Hour), directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki, and the Emile Zola adaptation Die Bestie im Menschen (The Human Beast, Ludwig Wolff 1921), Der Streik der Diebe (The Thieves’ Strike, Alfred Abel 1921), and Paul Czinner's drama Opfer der Leidenschaft (Victims of Passion, 1922) as female partner of Paul Bildt. With the role of the capricious dancer Barberina Campanini in the first and third part of the Fridericus Rex series (Sturm und Drang, 1922; Sanssouci, 1923) Maria Orska finished her film career.
Orska’s attempt to become a theatrical actress in Paris failed. Disappointed, the celebrated artist returned to Berlin and accepted commitments at the Komödienhaus, the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater. In 1927 for instance, in Hans Kaltneker's mystery play The Sisters at the theater in the Königgrätzer Strasse in Berlin, Orska played the lesbian Ruth. More and more however, Orska’s health visibly deteriorated by her morphine addiction. Divorced since 1925 by her husband, Dr. Hans von Bleichröder, Maria Orska became the talk of the town because of her own desire for death and her drug consumption. Nurses waited on the side stage with a syringe, directors dreaded every performance. Her suicide attempts - once she jumped off a train - soon became routine for the public. "They had an already typical character, they were each time after a rest and detox pause in the sanatorium, which the demon hunted artist used to leave like a fury, in order to escape from a life that had become worthless for her", Emil Faktor wrote in 1930.
All rehab attempts by Orska proved failing. She finally poisoned herself by an overdose of Veronal. The actress was brought to the Viennese General Hospital, where she died on May 16, 1930, at the age of only 37 – she couldn’t cope with a pneumonia because of her weakened body. Also the life of her sister Gabryela, who, born in 1894, became Marchesa di Serra Mantschedda when married to an Italian aristocrat, ended tragically, in 1924 (or 1926). Gabryela hanged herself in a Viennese hotel. Wikipedia claims it was after a row with her sister Maria. Their brother Edwin, aviator in the Russian Imperial Army, survived the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazis, and the sisters. In 1938 he emigrated from Germany to Ecuador where he died in 1966.
"Maria Orska was completely subordinate to the intoxication of the stage until it crushed her. Her strange appearance confirmed how difficult it is to understand the phenomenon of the stage actor. She seemed so enveloped in the air of the scene, but at the same time she remained so simple. She was a theatrical crowd-puller and a rhetorical star, such as Wilde’s Salome, and was also the most humble of Hedwig in Wildente [The Wild Duck] by Ibsen. She was hot and cold, she played and she lived ", Fritz Engel wrote. The famous artist Oskar Kokoschka drew the actress in 1922. Lithographies after his work hang in various museums, e.g. the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
Sources: www.steffi-line.de/archiv_text/nost_film20b40/178_orska_m..., German Wikipedia, filmportal, and IMDb.
