Marianne Hoppe

Born in Rostock, Hoppe became a leading lady of stage and films in Germany. She was born into a wealthy landowning family and was initially privately educated on her father's private estate. Later she attended school in Berlin and in Weimar, where she began to attend theatre. Hoppe first performed at 17 as a member of Berlin's Deutsches Theater under director Max Reinhardt. In 1935 she was hired by the controversial German actor and Director of the Prussian State Theatre under the Third Reich, Gustaf Gründgens. They were married from 1936 to 1946, until their divorce. Speaking years after the marriage had ended Hoppe stated, "He was my love, but never my great love, that was work." Her role in Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider of the White Horse, 1934) made her famous almost overnight, while her "Aryan" face made her a darling of the Nazi elite. Four years later after her divorce from Gründgens, Hoppe had a great success as Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and increasingly played avant-garde roles, written by authors such as Heiner Müller (Quartett, 1994) and Thomas Bernhard, who became her partner in private life as well. She became a favourite of the young and iconoclastic directors Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson and Frank Castorf. ==Death==