Early years Ebert was born in Berlin, the son of a Polish father, Count Anton Potulicky, who was a government official in Berlin, and an Irish-American mother, Mary Collins, a music student. To keep it secret from her family that she had an illegitimate child, Mary Collins persuaded a fellow-student, Eileen Lawless, to be officially recorded as the boy's mother. He was given the name of Charles Lawless. His father rented rooms in the house of Wilhelm and Maria Ebert in Berlin. He persuaded the couple to take charge of his son. From 1905 he trained for two years to be a banker, but in 1907 he gained a free place at
Max Reinhardt's School of Dramatic Art in Berlin, and pursued a career in the theatre. While a member of Reinhardt's resident company at the Deutsches Theatre, Ebert married Lucie Splisgarth (1889–1981) in 1912. They had a daughter, who became a leading German actress and died in 1946, and a son,
Peter, who became a stage director and theatre administrator. In the next seven years he played major roles for the Frankfurt company, and in 1919 he co-founded the Frankfurt Drama College. and Ebert married Gertrude Eck. All four remained on close terms with one another. While continuing to act with the Berlin company he was appointed director and professor at the new State drama school at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, a post he held for two years. In 1927 he was appointed Generalintendant of the
Landestheater Darmstadt, the first actor to hold the post. There he directed his first opera productions,
Le nozze di Figaro and
Otello (1929). For the next four years he refined his ideas for modernising the production of opera. In 1931 he was appointed to run the
Städtische Oper in Berlin.
Exile When the
Nazis came to power in 1933,
Hermann Göring, in his capacity as chief minister of Prussia, offered Ebert an expanded role, with control of all the opera houses of Berlin. With Christie's backing, they revolutionised the staging of opera in Britain.
The Times later said of Ebert: In
The Observer,
A H Fox Strangways wrote, "[T]his is the first time in this generation, and probably much longer, that opera has been done
right under English management. In 1936, at the instigation of
Kemal Atatürk, Ebert founded the opera and drama school of the
Ankara Conservatory. After five successful seasons Glyndebourne suspended productions for the duration of the Second World War. Both Busch and Ebert would have been liable to internment as enemy aliens had they remained in Britain, and Ebert moved his family to Ankara in 1940, remaining as head of the Department of the Performing Arts at the conservatory there until 1947.
Postwar At the end of the Second World War the Allied powers occupying Germany invited Ebert to undertake a thorough tour of all parts of the country and report on the state of the theatre. He did so, but declined the offer that followed of a permanent theatre post in Germany. When Glyndebourne reopened after the war Ebert and Busch returned, and their productions continued to set high standards. Ebert remained as artistic director until retiring in 1959. In 1948 Ebert created the opera department of the
University of Southern California,
Los Angeles of which he was professor and head until 1954. From this grew a professional company, the Guild Opera Company of Los Angeles, of which he was general director from 1950 to 1954. During this period he took American citizenship. In 1954 he finally returned to a permanent post in Germany, resuming his former position in charge of the Städtische Oper, Berlin. In 1961 he supervised the rebuilding and directed the opening production of the company's new opera house in Berlin, the
Deutsche Oper, after which he retired. Ebert continued to accept invitations to work as a guest director with Glyndebourne (until 1963), Zürich and the
Wexford Festival (until 1965), and Berlin (until 1967). In 1965 and 1967 he gave masterclasses, televised by the
BBC. Ebert retired to California, where he died in
Santa Monica at the age of 93. ==Selected filmography==