Elisabeth Bergner

Elisabeth Bergner was an Austrian-British actress born Ella vel Ettel Bergner on 22 August 1897 in Drohobych, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Sara Bergner and Emil Bergner, a merchant. She grew up in a secular Jewish household. Her stage career began at age 14, and within a year she was performing in Innsbruck. At 16, she was based in Vienna and touring Austrian and German provinces with a Shakespearean company. She later relocated to Munich and then to Berlin, where her career flourished. During this period she also worked as an artist's model, posing for sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

Bergner made her film debut in 1923 in Der Evangelimann. As Nazism rose in Germany, she left for London alongside film director Paul Czinner, whom she married in 1933. She became a naturalized British subject in 1938. Her London stage work included The Boy David in 1936, the final play written by J.M. Barrie, which he composed specifically for her. Her signature role was Gemma Jones in Escape Me Never, a play written for her by Margaret Kennedy. She performed the role first in London, then brought it to Broadway, and reprised it in a 1935 film adaptation for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also played the title role in the 1934 film The Rise of Catherine the Great, which was subsequently banned in Germany due to the government's racial policies. In 1936, she appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in As You Like It, the first sound film version of Shakespeare's play and the first sound Shakespeare film made in England, repeating the role of Rosalind she had previously performed on the German stage.

Bergner's Broadway career spanned 1935 to 1948. Her New York credits included Escape Me Never, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, The Cup of Trembling, and the play The Duchess of Malfi. In 1943, her performance in the comedy The Two Mrs. Carrolls earned her the Distinguished Performance Medal from the Drama League. She also appeared in the American film Paris Calling in 1941. Her stage portrayal of the title character in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi came in 1946.

During her run in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, Bergner took pity on a young woman who stood outside the theater for days and hired her as a secretary; the young actress subsequently attempted to take over Bergner's life. Bergner recounted this experience to writer Mary Orr, whose short story "The Wisdom of Eve," published in Cosmopolitan in 1946, drew on that account. The story later served as the basis for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's screenplay for the 1950 Academy Award for Best Picture-winning film All About Eve. Bergner was also reputedly the inspiration for the character of Dora Martin in Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto.

In 1954, Bergner returned to Germany, where she worked in film and on stage. The Berlin district of Steglitz named a city park in her honor. In 1973, she starred in Der Fußgänger, known in English as The Pedestrian, a film nominated for an Academy Award and winner of the Golden Globe for Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film of 1974. Austria awarded her the Cross of Merit for Science and Art in 1980, and in 1982 she received the Eleonora Duse Prize Asolo. Bergner died on 12 May 1986 in London at the age of 88 from cancer. She was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 15 May 1986, where an oval memorial tablet in the West Cloister commemorates her.