KATHARINA SCHRATT

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 62, 6 December 1930, Page 27

KATHARINA SCHRATT

Memories of Franz Josef

One of the most charming comedy actresses of the old Burgtheater, Vienna, Katharina Schratt, who has been in retirement for the past thirty years, has just had her 75th birthday. A good deal of pre-war Austria finds its embodiment in her. She was not only an excellent artist and a lover of the stage, but she had remained a lover of art, and possesses a collection of remarkable antiques which she'refuses to sell. The great event of her life was her friendship with the ageing Emperor Franz Josef. In the years when the monarch was weighed down by .political anxieties and the sad events in his unhappy family, including the murders of Crown Prince Rudolf and the Empress Elisabeth, it was Katharina Schratt who helped to cheer and console him. This friendship was certainly connected with the monarch’s unfortunate married life with the Empress Elisabeth, whose highly-strung,' artistic temperament was extremely different from Franz Josef’s methods of absolutism.

The Empress not only bore her husband’s friendship with the actress with the greatest tact, but became a real friend to her. Whenever she found the Emperor gloomy and depressed, she sent Frau Schratt to him. It was an ■ affair high above the gossiping of the Viennese, although to-day no doubts are left about the facts. It must be said in justice to Frau Schratt that she never used her influence in any unworthy way —a fact which is also proved by her consistent refusal of < the most tempting offers of publishers and editors, especially from America, ■to write her memoirs. t Of many episodes one remains unforgotten. The Empress wished to have Frau Schratt’s portrait painted for the Emperor, but the actress was not to be let into the secret. So the painter Apgeli begged Frau Schratt..to sit .to , him on behalf of an Englishman in high ' • position, whose recently-deceased wife had had a striking resemblance to the actress, and the portrait was finished without the sitter knowing that it was for the Emperor.