Helene Weigel (; 12 May 19006 May 1971) was a German actress and artistic director. She was the second wife of

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

and was married to him from 1930 until his death in 1956. Together they had two children.

Personal life

Weigel was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the daughter of Leopoldine (née Pollak) and Siegfried Weigel, an accountant-general in a textile factory. Her family was Jewish. She and husband Brecht had two children, Stefan Brecht and

Barbara Brecht-Schall Barbara Brecht-Schall (28 October 1930 – 31 August 2015) was a German actress. Born Barbara Marie Brecht in Berlin to Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, she had three siblings, a full brother Stefan, a half-brother Frank Banholzer and a half ...

. Weigel was a Communist Party member from 1930.

Career

Weigel became the artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble on 16 February 1949. She is best remembered for creating several Brecht roles, including: Pelagea Vlassova, '' The Mother'' of 1932; '' Antigone'' in Brecht's version of the Greek tragedy; the title role in his civil war play, '' Señora Carrar's Rifles''; and the iconic ''

Mother Courage Mother Courage (German ''Mutter Courage'') is a character from a Grimmelshausen novel ''Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche'' (''The Runagate Courage'') dating from around 1670. The character had played a cameo ro ...

''. Between 1933 and 1947, as a refugee from Adolf Hitler's Germany, she was seldom able to pursue her acting craft, even during the family's six-year period in Los Angeles. It was only with the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble in East Germany in 1949 that Brecht's theatre began to be recognized worldwide. She died in 1971, still at the helm of the company, and many of the roles that she created with Brecht are still in the theatre's repertoire today.

Death

Weigel died in

East Berlin East Berlin was the ''de facto'' capital city of East Germany from 1949 to 1990. Formally, it was the Allied occupation zones in Germany, Soviet sector of Berlin, established in 1945. The American, British, and French sectors were known as ...

on 6 May 1971, six days before her 71st birthday.

Notable understudies

* Ingrid Pitt, British-Polish actress

References

External links

Berliner Ensemble
*Jennifer Marston Willia
Biography of Helene Weigel
Jewish Women Encyclopedia * {{DEFAULTSORT:Weigel, Helene 1900 births 1971 deaths Actresses from Vienna Austrian Jews Austrian emigrants to Germany Communist Party of Germany politicians Jewish socialists Socialist Unity Party of Germany politicians Members of the Provisional Volkskammer Cultural Association of the GDR members East German women in politics 20th-century German actresses Jewish emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States Recipients of the National Prize of East Germany Recipients of the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold Family of Bertolt Brecht