George Bartenieff

George Bartenieff (January 24, 1933 – July 30, 2022) was an American stage and film actor born in Berlin, then part of the Weimar Republic. His parents, dancer Irmgard (Prim) Bartenieff and Michael Bartenieff, were Jewish and emigrated to the United States as the Nazi regime rose to power, settling in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Bartenieff and his brother Igor remained temporarily with maternal relatives in the Bavarian mountains before reuniting with their parents in the U.S. Over the course of his career, he appeared in nine Broadway productions, nineteen Off-Broadway productions, eighteen films, and twenty-one television episodes across fourteen programs. He received two Obie Awards and a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance.

Bartenieff made his stage debut at fourteen in the 1947 Broadway production The Whole World Over at the Biltmore Theatre, a production directed by Harold Clurman that featured Uta Hagen and Sanford Meisner and ran for one hundred performances. He subsequently trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, where he developed a strong interest in Shakespeare and aspired to a career as a classical actor. Returning to the United States, he worked with Andre Gregory's Theatre for the Living Arts in Philadelphia and, through the 1960s, collaborated with Gregory on Broadway, at Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, and in cross-disciplinary work at the Judson Poets Theatre at Judson Church in Greenwich Village.

His Broadway credits span more than four decades. He appeared in Montserrat at the Fulton Theatre in 1949, a play by Lillian Hellman that ran sixty-five performances. The Moon Besieged opened at the Lyceum Theatre in 1962. In 1964 he served as understudy in The Changeling at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, directed by Elia Kazan. Venus Is played the Billy Rose Theatre in 1966. In 1968, also at the Billy Rose Theatre, he appeared in two separate Edward Albee double bills: Box paired with Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and The Death of Bessie Smith paired with The American Dream. Cop-Out by John Guare ran at the Cort Theatre in 1969. His final Broadway credit was Unlikely Heroes at the Plymouth Theatre in 1971, a program of three one-act plays adapted from Philip Roth stories, including Epstein, which ran twenty-three performances.

During the 1960s, Bartenieff also engaged in street theatre, including a production with writer and landscape artist Bib Nichols that protested Robert Moses's proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. The production was staged in the streets of Little Italy and the West Village, neighborhoods that would have been displaced by the highway, and its set was designed to break apart if a vehicle passed through.

In 1970, Bartenieff co-founded Theatre for the New City alongside his then-wife, dancer Crystal Field, director Larry Kornfield, and Theo Barnes. The four had been involved with the Judson Poets Theatre and sought to establish a cross-disciplinary theater emphasizing poetic language. The company launched at the Westbeth Artists Community and went on to host other companies including Mabou Mines, the Talking Band, and Richard Foreman's company, while also producing street theatre intended to integrate the theater into its surrounding community. Bartenieff remained with Theatre for the New City for twenty-four years, during which he performed, directed, or produced more than nine hundred new American plays. He also co-founded the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

After departing Theatre for the New City, Bartenieff collaborated with his wife, playwright and director Karen Malpede, on a one-man show titled I Will Bear Witness, an adaptation of the memoirs of Victor Klemperer documenting daily life as a Jewish professor in Nazi Germany. His performance in that production earned him a personal Obie Award in 2001. The work marked the beginning of Theater Three Collaborative, the company he and Malpede founded together, which was in its seventeenth year as of 2012.

His Off-Broadway work included productions at the Public Theater, Lincoln Center, the Cherry Lane Theatre, and other venues. Notable credits include Václav Havel's The Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, both at the Public Theater; a 1965 double bill of Krapp's Last Tape and The Zoo Story directed by Alan Schneider; JoAnne Akalaitis's Dead End Kids for Mabou Mines; a 1989 production of Cymbeline directed by Akalaitis with music by Philip Glass; and David Hare's Stuff Happens at the Public Theater in 2006, for which he received the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance. He also appeared in a 2009 production of The Bacchae at the Delacorte Theater with music by Philip Glass.

Beyond performing, Bartenieff taught at the City University of New York and at a high school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He died in New York City on July 30, 2022, at the age of eighty-nine.