Background
Bergner was born in Drohobycz, Galicia on August 22, 1897.
Bergner was born in Drohobycz, Galicia on August 22, 1897.
She received her dramatic training at the Vienna Conservatory and made her stage debut in 1919 in Zurich.
After a number of small parts, she was cast for the role of Ophelia in Alexander Moissi’s production of Hamlet and followed this success with Rosalind in a production of "As You Like It" that brought her back to Vienna. She was often cast in roles requiring male attire; with her slight build and elfin features the effect was never unbecoming. Along with Rosalind in "As You Like It", Shaw’s Saint Joan became a staple of her repertoire.
In Berlin, she was directed by Max Reinhardt in Shakespeare at the Deutsches Volkstheater and in 1928 undertook a memorable tour of Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Austria, playing in works by Shakespeare, Ibsen, and others.
From 1923 onwards she appeared in films, mostly directed by Paul Czinner, whom she married in 1933. These included the screen version of Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else, a role much associated with her. She emigrated with her husband to Britain in 1933, making her London stage debut in Margaret Kennedy’s "Escape Me Never".
For the film version, directed by Czinner two years later, she was nominated for an Academy Award. Her first British film was "Catherine the Great", which became the first film suppressed in Nazi Germany because of Jewish participation. Bergner had made no secret of her feelings toward the Nazi regime and was the subject of an attack in the Völkischer Beobachter by Alfred Rosenberg. In 1936 Czinner directed her in a film version of "As You Like It" opposite Laurence Olivier.
In 1936, she starred in Sir James Barrie’s last play, "The Boy David", which had been written specially for her, but which was not successful. However, on Barrie’s death, a few months later, she was one of the beneficiaries in his will, for having given “the best performance ever given in any play of mine.”
Bergner spent most of the war in America, where she made only one film, but enjoyed a long run in "The Two Mrs. Carrolls" on the New York stage. In the late 1940s she took her first steps in the new medium of television and toured extensively, including an appearance in the new "State of Israel" in 1949.
Apart from sporadic film appearances, her remaining work was done in the theater, with appearances in West Germany, Austria, Britain and Australia during the 1950s. She was widowed in 1972 and two years before her death was one of six émigré actors feted at the thirty-third Berlin Film Festival.
Somebody asked me, if I could share what I thought on 30 January 1933 [the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany], So I said: How should I know what I thought on 30 January 1933. What happened then? I had no idea, what he was talking about. It was as if you were to ask me: what did you think last week on Thursday? I had no idea. — I was already in England then. Really a godsend, that I was there already. What did I think? I thought: this is nonsense. I really believed that, for a long time. Until I saw, it remains nonsense, but it becomes more and more tragic.