Background
Janauschek was born on July 20, 1830, in Prague, Austrian Empire (now Czech Republic), one of nine children in a humble family. As a child she showed musical talent, but this was soon over-borne by her histrionic gifts.
Janauschek was born on July 20, 1830, in Prague, Austrian Empire (now Czech Republic), one of nine children in a humble family. As a child she showed musical talent, but this was soon over-borne by her histrionic gifts.
When still in her teens, Julius Benedix trained Janauschek in Cologne, and made her his leading actress in Frankfurtam-Main in 1848.
During the 1850's, Janauschek became one of Germany's leading tragediennes, played successfully in Russia and elsewhere on the Continent, and received many gifts of jewels from various rulers. In 1867 she came to America, acting in German. Augustin Daly saw her at the Academy of Music in New York, playing in Deborah, and persuaded her to learn English. She devoted the year 1869 to this task. But meanwhile, on November 7, 1868, she appeared in Boston with Edwin Booth, in Macbeth, he of course acting in English, she in German. Such things were permitted in those days - even encouraged. On October 13, 1870, Janauschek began her career in English, under Daly's management, at the New York Academy of Music, acting in Mary Stuart. The New York papers compared her English favorably with Fechter's and praised her acting highly. She also won great favor with her Deborah and other of her transplanted rôles and is said to have cleared $20, 000 on the season. She remained in America, acting in English, for four years, going back to Germany in 1874. But in 1880 she returned and thereafter made America her home. Meanwhile, however, public taste and the styles of drama were changing rapidly, and Janauschek, who was now a woman of fifty, trained in the old German school, would not and probably could not change with them. Hers was the "bold, broad school" of acting, and her rôles included such parts as Medea, Mary Stuart, Catherine II, Brunhilde, Lady Macbeth, and the dual rôle of Hortense and Lady Dedlock in a dramatization of Bleak House. When she added to her repertoire Meg Merrilies, once a famous part of Charlotte Cushman's, the play already seemed to the critics "a long, tiresome melodrama. " Janauschek had been further handicapped by bad businessmanagement. F. J. Pillot, styled a German baron, had conducted - or misconducted - her early tours of the country, and was said by some to be her husband, but both denied it. As the years crept on, and her popularity waned with the changing times, Janauschek sought to recapture attention by acting in extravagant melodramas, or else had to be content with subordinate parts. In 1895 she played Mother Rosenbaum in The Great Diamond Robbery, which her grandiloquent style fitted. Thereafter she attempted vaudeville, and once at least made a tour as Meg Merrilies with a very bad company and shabby scenery. She suffered a stroke in her Brooklyn home in 1900, and was moved to Saratoga. Fellow players arranged a benefit for her in 1901 and raised $5, 000, but this was soon gone, and her collection of rich costumes and jewels were then sold to support her last years. Janauschek died on November 28, 1904, at a home in Amityville, Long Island, and it is recorded that scarce twenty people attended the funeral.
Janauschek was plain and rugged of feature and had to conquer her audiences by the quality of her voice, the commanding sweep of her gesture and pose, and the tragic intensity of her impersonations. There is no doubt but she embodied with both passion and keen intelligence a style of tragic acting once popular, but that she neither could nor would change that style to meet the changes in taste. Hence she became a brave, stubborn, unhappy old woman, and died alone and almost forgotten in an alien land.
