born on January 11, 1899 in London, England
died on June 3, 1991 in Weston, Connecticut, United States
US-American actor, director, theater owner and producer, and translator
125th birthday on January 11, 2024
Biography
For decades, Eva Le Gallienne was the driving force of American repertory theater as the “most European actress in the USA” and as a director, translator, theater producer and manager. This achievement is all the more remarkable in view of the destructive internal and external forces she was forced to grapple with throughout her life. Biographer Robert A. Schanke called her “the Nureyev of the twenties” and explained: “Her budding reputation took a dramatic shift around 1918 when she initiated an affair with the exotic and notorious Alla Nazimova. In the next thirty years she would charm many women. For most of her life, she chose to live in shadows. Like many women of her generation who loved other women, she viewed herself as a man trapped in a female body. Her sexuality became her nemesis and defined her great need for privacy, coloring her selection of scripts, casting, management practices, style of acting, and ultimately her critical reception.”
At the age of 32, Eva Le Gallienne was almost killed in a terrible accident when a fire broke out in her vacation home. She only survived because, as she put it, her “temperament was not inclined to screaming.” If she had opened her mouth to scream and inhaled after the propane gas explosion, her lungs would have been destroyed.
Eva Le Gallienne, the daughter of the Danish journalist Julie Norregaard and the English writer Richard Le Gallienne, was born in 1899. Life at home in London was chaotic: her father was a womanizer and drunkard who regularly abandoned the family to pursue his latest love interest while leaving behind a mountain of debt. The family was forced to move into ever cheaper lodgings.
Eva spent a large part of her childhood with her mother and a loving nanny in Paris. The theater performances with Sarah Bernhardt that she attended were a defining experience. Because she had no money to buy her idol’s autobiography, she borrowed the book and copied all 800 pages of it! Later, she became acquainted with Duse, who was probably the exact opposite of Bernhardt in terms of acting technique. These two actors were her greatest role models.
After training as an actor, she went to the United States and celebrated her first triumph on Broadway in 1920. But show business held no appeal for her; she remained intellectually and artistically demanding throughout her life, turning down more lucrative jobs than she could actually afford. She took on her first movie role at the age of 80! Believing that the great classic plays should be readily available in a repertoire and admission prices should be low in order to reach a broad audience, she set out to establish a theater culture in the United States similar to the one she knew from Europe. The American stage, where show business is a business, was very different from European theater. Promising plays were, and still are, “produced” by theater companies. First, they are brought out off-Broadway to be tested for their audience appeal. They must then prove themselves on Broadway and finally — after they no longer draw crowds in New York — they end up on tour in smaller cities. In contrast, European theater is mostly state-subsidized and serves the cultural education of the audience and the cultivation of classic plays. Eva Le Gallienne was convinced that the theater was just as important for people as public schools and libraries and that American audiences deserved a culture of theater.
With these cultural and political convictions and facing increasingly cruel criticism due to her “inability to convincingly portray female devotion,” Eva Le Gallienne decided to start her own theater business at the age of 27 in 1926. She founded the first repertory theater on American soil: the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York. In the six years of its glorious existence, she produced 30 plays, directed 28 of them and played leading roles in most of them. In 1932, the theater was forced to close due to the Great Depression.
In 1946, together with Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford, she founded the famous American Repertory Theatre (ART), a touring theater company. She wrote the best biography of Duse available in English and two autobiographies. She also translated many plays by Ibsen as she was familiar with the Scandinavian languages thanks to her Danish mother.
Eva Le Gallienne continued to appear on stage into the eighties of her life. A major figure of twentieth-century American theater, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest artistic honor in the United States, by Ronald Reagan in 1986.
(Text from 1998; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
She was a real Jekyll and Hyde, friendly one moment, mean the next. (Robert A. Schanke 1992: xx)
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