Ida Orloff

Her younger son Wolfgang Leppman became an eminent germanist. He was a professor at the University of Eugene, Oregon and the author of biographies of Goethe, Rilke and Hauptmann. He was known for his wit and irony and died in 2002.

When the Russian army invaded Austria she was confident that she could talk to the soldiers and stop them from plundering, but when news went round that the Russians were extremely violent and raped Austrian women everywhere she committed suicide to escape that faith (possibly she was first attacked by a soldier). A few days earlier her son Hermann had fallen in the war near Vienna. Ida was buried in the garden of the house where she had lived in Tullnerbach and only in 1953 her remains were transferred to the cemetery in Pressbaum.

On March 31th, 1942 she played her last part ever in "Pillar's of Society" by Ibsen.

Her second husband was a Jew and when the Nazi's came to power in 1933 they left Germany and went to Italy. In Italy she was unable to work and soon she got in serious financial trouble. She asked the writer Gerhart Hauptmann to help her (he knew Mussolini), but he refused, stating that he couldn't trouble Mussolini with private affairs.

During her third pregnancy her marriage to Satter finally broke down and she returned to Vienna alone to give birth to a son, Hermann, on March 31th, 1918. She gave the child into the care of Satter's older sister Hanna and went to Berlin with her other son. here she returned to the theatre and played several parts before she decided to marry the critic and journalist Franz Leppman and left the stage. With Leppmann she had two more sons.

She was an actress, known for Atlantis (1913) and Baccarat (1919).

It was discovered years later that Orloff had been a secret lover and an inspirational muse for Gerhart Hauptmann, who won the 1912 Nobel Prize for Literature. Secretly he wrote a play especially for her, "Und Pippa tanzt!" (1906). They started an affair and from Hauptmann's diary we know that he watched fascinated when she undressed for him on Match 27th, 1906. But Hauptmann had recently remarried and would not leave his wife Margaretha Marschalk. He considered her a little devil but he found it hard to break the spell that seemed to be put on him. They spent five days together at Göhren and Rügen in June, 1906 and possibly Hauptmann's wife knew about it and tolerated it.

On July 23th, 1907 she married a friend from her youth, Karl Satter, just to be able to enjoy more freedom without causing scandals. She divorced him on January 26th, 1908 because she had what she wanted - a married name on her passport - but against her own expectations they stayed together for 10 years. She bore him a son, Heinrich, on September 27th, 1908. As an adult he looked strikingly like the writer Gerhart Hauptmann who may have been his father.

In 1906 she met the writer Gerhart Hauptmann and she enters a serious relationship with him at the age of 16 and she became his muse.

She got acting lessons at a theater school before she entered the stage in 1905.

Ida Orloff was born on February 16, 1889 in St. Petersburg, Russia as Ida Margaretha Weissbeck.