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Judith Malina

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Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Born (1926-06-04) June 4, 1926 (age 98)
Kiel, Germany
CitizenshipUS
EducationThe New School for Social Research
Occupation(s)Actor, director, writer
Known forCo-founding The Living Theatre
Spouses
Signature

Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926) is a German-born American theater and film actress, writer, and director. She co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 60s.

Early life

Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Jewish parents: her mother, Rosel (née Zamora), was a former actress, and her father, Max Malina, a rabbi in the Conservative denomination.[1][2] In 1929 at the age of three, she immigrated with her parents to New York City. Her parents helped her see how important political theatre was, as her father was trying to warn people of the Nazi menace.[3] Except for long tours, she has lived in New York ever since. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social Research in 1945 to study theatre under Erwin Piscator. Malina was greatly influenced by Piscator's philosophy of theatre which was similar to Bertolt Brecht's principles of "epic theatre" but went further in departing from traditional narrative forms. Piscator saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop (“Theatre interests me only when it is a matter of interest to society.”[4]); Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.[5]

Marriage and family

Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, in 1943, when she was 17 and he was a student at Yale University. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in political theatre. In 1947 the couple founded The Living Theatre, which they directed together until Beck's death in 1985. Malina's and Beck's marriage was as unconventional as their work: Beck was bisexual and had a male partner, and Malina was involved with a series of men.[citation needed] The couple had two children: a son Garrick and a daughter Isha.

Career

In 1963 they had to close the Living Theatre because of IRS charges (later proved false) of tax problems, and Malina and Beck were convicted of contempt of court, in part because Judith defended Julian wearing the garb of Portia from The Merchant of Venice - and tried to use a similar argument.[6] They received a five-year suspended sentence, and decided to leave the U.S. The company spent the next five years touring in Europe and creating increasingly radical works, culminating in Paradise Now. They returned to the US in 1968 to present their new work. In her book The Enormous Despair (1972), part of her series of published diaries, Malina expressed the sense of danger and unfamiliarity she felt on returning to the U.S. in the midst of the social upheavals of the late 1960s. [citation needed]

In 1969 the company decided to divide into three groups. One worked on the pop scene in London, another went to India to study traditional Indian theatre arts, and the third, including Malina and Beck, traveled in 1971 to Brazil to tour. They were imprisoned there on political charges for two months by the military government.

After Beck's death from cancer in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov, who had become Malina's lover (they married in 1988), assumed co-leadership of the company. In 2007 it opened its own theater at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan. In April 2008 Reznikov suffered a stroke, and while hospitalized, he died of pneumonia on May 3 at the age of 57. [citation needed]

Malina appeared occasionally in films, beginning in 1975, when she played Al Pacino's mother in Dog Day Afternoon. Other roles include in Pacino's Looking for Richard. She played Grandma Addams in The Addams Family (1991), and had major roles in Household Saints (1993) and the low-budget film, Nothing Really Happens (2003). She appeared in an episode of long-running TV series The Sopranos in 2006 as a nun, the secret mother of Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri.

Judith Malina is the subject of a 2012 documentary by Azad Jafarian titled Love and Politics. The film premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Malina had a significant supporting role in the well-received Enemies, A Love Story (1989), acting alongside Lena Olin, Ron Silver and Anjelica Huston.

Awards

  • Other awards include an honorary doctorate from Lehman College, the Lola d’Annunzio award (1959); Page One Award (1960); Obie Award (1960, 1964, 1969, 1975, 1987, 1989, and 2007); Creative Arts Citation, Brandeis University (1961); Grand Prix du Théâtre des Nations (1961); Paris Critics Circle medallion (1961); Prix de L’Université de Paris (1961); New England Theater Conference Award (1962); Olympio Prize (1967); and a Guggenheim fellowship (1985).

Credits

References

  1. ^ Lester, Elenore (October 13, 1968). "The Living Theater presents: Revolution! Joy! Protest! Shock! Etc.!; The Living Theater". The New York Times. Retrieved May 7, 2010.
  2. ^ Weichselbaum, Lehman (2011-01-18). "Judith Malina's 'Jewish Anarchist Play'". The Jewish Week. Retrieved 2011-01-19.
  3. ^ Fliotsos, Anne; Wendy Vierow (2008). American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. University of Illinois Press. p. 258. ISBN 0-252-03226-8.
  4. ^ Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall 2012, p. 185
  5. ^ Richard Trousdell: "The Director as Pacifist-Anarchist: An Interview with Judith Malina." The Massachusetts Review Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 22-38 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25089945?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21101520275707
  6. ^ Gary Botting, "The Living Theatre" in The Theatre of Protest in America (Edmonton: Harden House, 1972) 18
  7. ^ "Theater honors put women in the spotlight". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
  8. ^ 2008 IT Award Winners Announced Brian Scott Lipton, TheatreMania, September 23, 2008
  9. ^ 2008 Honorary Awards Recipients Doug Strassler, New York Innovative Theatre Awards, September 15, 2008
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