Elisabeth Bergner

Elisabeth Bergner (22 August 1897 – 12 May 1986) was an Austrian-born actress of Jewish descent who rose to prominence in European theater and early cinema before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933. Primarily a stage performer, she debuted in 1915 and achieved stardom under director Max Reinhardt with roles such as Rosalind in As You Like It, which she played for 566 performances, and Joan in Saint Joan. Her film career included leading parts in works directed by her husband, Paul Czinner, notably Escape Me Never (1935), for which she earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

After relocating to London, where she became a British citizen in 1938, Bergner supported émigré artists and facilitated the escape of actors and children from Nazi persecution, leveraging her finances and connections for anti-fascist efforts. Despite challenges in exile, including a professional setback from withdrawing from the film 49th Parallel (1941) amid World War II—later criticized as desertion—she continued performing on Broadway and in films, later returning to Germany in the 1950s for stage and screen work. Bergner received later honors such as the Schiller Prize (1962) and the Eleonora Duse Prize (1982), and published memoirs in 1978 recounting her experiences.

Elisabeth Bergner was born Ella vel Ettel Bergner on August 22, 1897, in Drohobycz (now Drohobych, Ukraine), a town in the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her parents were Juda Schmelke Bergner (later known as Emil Ettel), a merchant born in 1867, and Sara Bergner (née Wagner, also known as Anna Rosa), born in 1873; the family was Jewish and observed secular customs rather than strict religious practices.

The Bergner family adopted the surname Ettel for assimilation purposes upon relocating to Vienna shortly after her birth, reflecting broader patterns among Galician Jews seeking integration in urban centers. Bergner grew up in a middle-class household with her older sister, Margarethe. Emil Ettel died in 1935, by which time the family had established roots in the Austrian capital, providing Bergner with exposure to German-speaking culture amid the empire's multicultural fabric. Bergner displayed an early aptitude for acting, receiving private tutoring from psychodramatist Jacob Levy Moreno beginning in 1907, which nurtured her initial passion for performance. At age 14, in 1911, she enrolled in a private acting school in Vienna to formalize her skills. From 1912 to 1915, she pursued advanced training at the Academy for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna under instructor Stefan Hock, whose emphasis on the German classical repertoire cultivated her reverence for dramatic tradition.

The partnership deepened personally as political pressures mounted in Germany; Bergner and Czinner, both Jewish, relocated to London in 1933 and married there on January 9 of that year, formalizing their bond just weeks before Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor. Their marriage endured until Czinner's death on June 22, 1972, with no children born to the union, and it provided mutual support during decades of exile across Europe and the United States. Professionally, Czinner continued directing and producing Bergner's work in exile, helming English adaptations like Escape Me Never (1935, from a Margaret Kennedy play), As You Like It (1936, Shakespeare's comedy with Laurence Olivier), Dreaming Lips (the 1937 English remake of Der träumende Mund), and Stolen Life (1939, based on a novel by Karel Josef Benes).