BERGNER THE ARTIST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 5 (Supplement)

BERGNER THE ARTIST.

HER TEST AS AN ACTRESS. LIGHT ON A GREAT CAREER. (By WEE WILLIE.) Devious indeed are the roads to theatrical success. When she was almost 14, Elisabeth Bergner began to practise her art. Born in Vienna in 1900, she was touring the Austrian and German provinces at the age of 16 with a Shakespearean repertoire company, playing Rosalind, Viola and Ophelia. At 20 she was playing Juliet with Moissi in Berlin. Miss Bergner, who startled the great English-speaking cinema world as Alexander Korda's "Catherine the Great," has her future all mapped out. With the acclamations of "Catherine" still ringing loud, she appeared in the West End in the central role of Gemma in Margaret Kennedy's new sequel to '"The Constant Nymph," "Escape Me Never" its initial stage presentation. London critics let themselves go on the subject. Result, a wonderful season. She has just completed an English film version of the play and earlier this year was established in the play in New York by C. B. Cochran. After that, she is to return to England for a film of George Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan" (of which more later). Elisabeth Bergner made an earlier attempt to invade England. With characteristic thoroughness, she went into voluntary obscurity for a period in order to learn English. Marriage and Films. Her test as an actress, she has been known to say, was'(l) to play "Saint Joan" in its native tongue; (2) to produce "Amphritrion," a French play dealing with the amours of a god who came to earth disguised as a mortal. She learned English and struggled to obtain a good translation for her daring French vehicle. But her English invasion was repelled in a war with the British censor, and so London never saw her in "St. Joan" either.

As to her cinema background, it took the combined persuasion of Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt and Dr. Paul Czinner to get her before' the camera for their "Nju." She hated herself as a film actress, and it might have been her last screen adventure had not; Dr. Czinner married her soon afterward. As a good wife of a man who dreamed and expressed unusual things in the screen art, she gave herself perhaps indifferently at first, to such motion-picture experiments as "The Violinist of Florence," "Love," "Donna Juana," "Fraulein Else, ,, "Ariane" and "The Dreaming Mouth." "The Versatile Viennese." In time, however, her husband's feelings for film expression infected her, and she was as happy as any of her coworkers when the lastnamed two of these pictures won the grand prix for the beet European productions of 1932 and 1933, respectively. "Tho Versatile Viennese," the English critics have called her, reminding one that she can be a perfect tomboy, and appealingly wistful in such a role; that she can be as worldly-wise and decadent

as she pleases, and yet essentially feminine always. In fact, she is a mass of contradictions. Is a Bore, Anyway. A restless little creature, she ie interested only in doing a good job for the sake of getting that job out of the way as quickly as possible. In an interview with a London writer, she said: "There are times when I am doing a play and I wish I could be in a picture. But no sooner am I doing a picture than I long to be back on the stage. Stage acting, because you are playing the saino role eight times a week, soon gets tiresome; and picturemaking, because you are trying to work up emotion frora a 'cold' start, soon gets troublesome. So the only thing to do is to keep jumping back and forth in the hopo that the 'other one' will give you relief."