Stage and Screen

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 178, 14 August 1937, Page 10

Stage and Screen

ELISABETH BERGNER IS INTENSELY SHY PERSON

V * Elisafieth Bergner is expected to tour Australia at the end of this year, and tliere is a possibility that she will afterwards come to New Zealand. I met Elisabeth Bergner in London some time before her nanle was skyrocketed to frenzied fame in Englishspeaking countries by her appearanco on the stage of the Apollo Theatre in "Eseape Me Never. " So- writes Leslie Kees in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. Alrcady, of courso, she was a celebrated actress on the Contment, known as "the Sybil Thorndike of Germaay^ (though she is an Austrian), because of her "Saint J oan. ' ' She had played Kosalind in Cierman severai hundreda of times. As she was a Jewess, Nazism drovo her fcrth; and together with Paul Czinuer, the man who had direeted her in "Dreaming Lips ' ' and other films, she went to England. There the pair were quietly married. . , The, close and vindictive nationalism ncwy desecrating central Europe was not ' apparent in London. Various film and stage magnates argued for Elisabeth Bergner 's talents. 'l't was at this time I talked with her in a private rooni of the Mayfair Hotel. She* was an intenscly shy, almost inconsLderalile person to meet. Not pretty, not beautifnl. Her .Eaglish was fair, but she seemed unwilling -to engage in more conversation. that was absolutely necessary. She was extremely riervous and diffident,' hn'd had few ppinions. Her hair was an indefihite tawny col* our, her eyes were wide and gleamlng, and followed you about. It was an nneomfortable meeting. Tbe only clear statement I had, from her was that

Margaret Kennedy was the greatest English dramatist. A little later, it was announced by 0. B. Cochran that Elisabeth Bergner would appear in a new piay by Margaret Kennedy. ' For weeks a suitable tite could not be found; Dodie Smith came to the reseue with "Escape Me Meyer," all the disappointment caused by my meeting with Elisabeth Bergner was set aside. For she was the most startlingly intense actress I had ever seen. The play was a coclctail, deliberately compounded of half a dozeri moods and scttings, in order to give Bergner the sarne number of varied histrionic opportunities. At the beginning she was an innocent gamin, dre&sed as a schoolgirl, and appearing to be one, until she suddenly revealed quite nicely that she had had a baby by one man and was living with another. She remained something of a gamin to the end, a wildly unconventional and . tremendously feminine gipsy, but seen also as a diplomtic, cleverly-managing woman, a passionate, angry woman, a wise woman who undersfcood the world rs ways, and, finally, as the dazed, wrecked, and immensely pathetic mother of a dead child. "Escape Me Never," with a severai weeks' break for Bergner 's illness, ran on without -a single vacant seat for severai.- months, until the actress, naturally delicate, could play it • no. longer. Later, she made the tilm'of* "Catherine the Great, ' ' a poor illm really, but signiiicant in that it did give another and a separate view of Bergner. For here it was her eyes rather than her small, tremuious, boylike :limbs, that one was literally compfelled to . watch, so magnetic thei'r powers. Those .wide.orhs were windows -iiito her every nnance of emotion, her every' shade of thought.