Tilla Durieux

Tilla Durieux, born Ottilie Helene Angela Godeffroy on 18 August 1880 in Vienna, was an Austrian theatre and film actress whose career spanned the better part of the twentieth century. Her father, Richard Max Victor Godeffroy, was an Austrian chemist, and her mother, Adelheid Ottilie Augustine Godeffroy, née Hrdlicka, was a Hungarian-born pianist of Romanian origin who died in 1920. Durieux received her early schooling in Vienna, attending elementary school before transferring to a public school in the Alsergrund district. She was baptized in the evangelical parish of the Augsburg Confession in Vienna and later converted to Catholicism on 31 May 1928. She adopted the surname Durieux as a stage name because her mother objected to her pursuing an acting career.

After training as an actress in Vienna, Durieux made her professional stage debut at the Moravian Theatre in Olmütz, now known as Olomouc, in 1902. She subsequently relocated to Berlin, where she worked with director Max Reinhardt and became associated with a circle of expressionist artists that included Kurt Hiller and Jakob van Hoddis. In 1903, she performed the role of Salome alongside Gertrud Eysoldt in Oscar Wilde's play of the same name, a performance that brought her considerable recognition. The role drew the attention of prominent visual artists, among them Auguste Renoir, Max Slevogt, Lovis Corinth, and Franz von Stuck, each of whom painted her portrait.

In 1911, Durieux joined the company of the Lessing Theater in Berlin. On 1 November 1913, she became the second actress to play Eliza Doolittle in a German-language production of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, a performance that preceded the play's English-language premiere by roughly half a year; that premiere took place on 11 April 1914. From 1915 onward, she performed at the Royal Schauspielhaus Berlin. In 1923, Durieux brought her career to Broadway, appearing in Dario Niccodemi's play The Shadow at the 39th Street Theatre, her sole Broadway credit.

Durieux's personal life intersected significantly with the Berlin art world. In 1904, she married the Berlin Secession painter Eugen Spiro, whose younger sister was Baladine Klossowska. The marriage ended in a consensual divorce in 1905, after Durieux had begun a relationship with art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer. She and Cassirer married in 1910. Through that union, Durieux became involved in art collecting, and the Tilla Durieux and Paul Cassirer Collection came to include modern works alongside family portraits. The marriage lasted sixteen years, ending in divorce in 1926. Cassirer, deeply affected by the separation, took his own life in a room adjacent to the courtroom where the divorce proceedings had taken place.

Durieux subsequently married Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, a general director. In 1927, the two were among the principal financiers of Erwin Piscator's Neues Schauspielhaus project. Durieux was a prominent figure in 1920s Berlin society and was acquainted with numerous public figures, including the photographer Frieda Riess.

When the Nazi regime came to power, Durieux and Katzenellenbogen left Germany for Switzerland in 1933, taking a portion of their art collection with them. She continued to perform during this period, appearing at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt and on stages in Prague. In 1937, she moved to Zagreb, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where she became a member of the International Red Aid. Her attempts to obtain a visa for the United States were unsuccessful. In 1941, Katzenellenbogen was arrested by Gestapo agents in Thessaloniki and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He died in 1944 at the Jüdisches Krankenhaus Berlin.

Durieux returned to West Germany in 1952 and resumed her stage career, performing in Berlin, Hamburg, and Münster. Productions in which she appeared during this period included August Strindberg's A Dream Play, Max Frisch's The Chinese Wall, and Gerhart Hauptmann's Atriden-Tetralogie.

The fate of Durieux's art collection remained contested for decades. After she and Katzenellenbogen emigrated in 1933, the collection eventually became integrated into the Zlata Lubienski Art Collection in Zagreb. On 13 November 1945, Croatian authorities declared that collection a protected holding under the Section for Museums of the Department of Art and Culture of the Ministry of Education of the Federal Republic of Croatia. Durieux and Lubienski challenged the designation but were denied. On 17 February 1982, the City Institute for the Conservation of Cultural and Natural Heritage for the City Council in Zagreb issued a permit for the export of the Tilla Durieux Collection. A commission reviewed the holdings, and the collection was divided: nineteen works remained in Zagreb as part of a new Tilla Durieux Collection at the City Museum in Zagreb, while 58 items were exported to Germany, where many were subsequently sold. Heirs of Ludwig Katzenellenbogen and his former wife Estella have listed fifty artworks with the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste.

Durieux died on 21 February 1971, following surgery for a hip fracture, from post-operative sepsis. The date inscribed on her gravestone reads 21 January 1971, though she died on 21 February 1971, which would have marked the hundredth birthday of Paul Cassirer. She was ninety years old.