Gertrud Eysoldt

Vocation

German actress, theatre director and drama teacher. She made her theatre debut in 1890 at the Court Theatre in Munich. She was an ensemble member of the theatres of Max Reinhardt, playing at various theatres in Meiningen, Dresden, Munich, Riga, Stuttgart and Berlin. She played, among others, the roles of Salome, Lulu, Elektra and Penthesilea, in works by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and Frank Wedekind. She taught probably more than 2,000 pupils in the 1920s at the German Academy of Dramatic Arts. From 1920 to 1922 she was director of the Kleinen Schauspielhaus Berlin-Charlottenburg, becoming famous by masterfully playing Vamprollen in several movies. She was reputed to be the "first feminist of the German theatre." She was friends with the most famous psychiatrist in Berlin, theatre practitioner and psychotherapist Arthur Kronfeld, who worked at the Institute of Sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld at the time. Her first marriage was to Max Martersteig; her second marriage to Benno Berneis. She died on 6 January 1955 in Ohlstadt, Upper Bavaria. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)