Tilla Durieux

She was an actress and writer, known for Verdammt zur Sünde (1964), Die letzte Brücke (1954) and Auferstehung (1958). She was married to Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, Paul Cassirer and Eugene Spiro.

In 1955 she returned to Berlin, dedicating herself to acting until the end of her days.

Durieux unsuccessfully tried to obtain visa for the United States; in 1941 Ludwig Katzenellenbogen was arrested by Gestapo agents in Thessaloniki and deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was killed in 1944.

The Zagreb period (1934-1952) was a refuge, peace and respite before new trials. In the foyer of the Croatian National Theatre (CNT) she met Zlata Lubienski and from 1938 dwelled in Jurjevska Street, at number 27.

In 1933 Durieux and her husband left Germany for Switzerland to escape Nazi rule. She continued to perform at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt and in Prague.

She got married with the industrialist Ludwig Katzenellenbogen in 1930 and they had to emigrate from Germany in 1933. From now on she played in Zurich, Prague and Vienna, later also in Budapest and Paris. When the married couple tried to depart from Yugoslavia in 1941, Tilla Durieux's husband was arrested and deported, he died in Oranienburg in 1944. Tilla Durieux got involved in the Yugoslav resistance movement from 1941 to 1945.

In 1927 Durieux and Ludwig Katzenellenbogen were the main financiers of the Neues Schauspielhaus project by Erwin Piscator.

Durieux was a public character of 1920s Berlin and associated with numerous celebrities like the famous photographer Frieda Riess.

In July 1914, just prior to the outbreak of World War I, the famous German actress Tilla Durieux traveled to Paris with her husband, the art dealer Paul Cassirer, to pose for Renoir. The classicizing, pyramidal format of this composition lends a certain grandeur to the sitter, attired in the costume that the couturier Poiret designed for her role as Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion in 1913. When Renoir painted this ambitious portrait, he was so crippled with arthritis that he had to sit in a wheelchair with his brush strapped to his hand.

In 1904, Durieux married the Berlin Secession painter Eugen Spiro, and after their divorce, she remarried in 1910 the successful art dealer and editor Paul Cassirer, who committed suicide in a room next to the court room that pronounced their divorce.

Her period between 1903 and 1918 was marked by two key figures. Max Reinhardt created the actress, and Paul Cassirer brought her into the centre of the most advanced events of the fin de siecle.

In 1901 she got her first theater engagement at the Königlich-Städtischen Theater in Olmütz and already in 1903 she played at the stages of Max Reinhardt in Berlin.

Tilla Durieux was born on August 18, 1880 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary as Ottilie Godeffroy.