Marie Seebach

* 24.02.1829 in Riga; ✝ 03.08.1897 in St. Moritz

Actress

Biography

Marie Seebach began her theatrical career with child-roles, such as William Tell’s son, in Cologne, where her father, the actor Friedrich Wilhelm Seebach, had a theatrical engagement. It was in Lübeck in 1848 that she began to specialize in romantic leads and loose women, appearing in Danzig and at the Court Theatre in Kassel, among other places. Heinrich Laube encouraged her to take on more tragic roles, and the first of these was that of Gretchen, which she performed in Hamburg in 1852, and which was to remain her most celebrated role. Dingelstedt secured her services for his exemplary productions in Munich and Weimar in 1857.  Her countless tours made her famous in Europe and even beyond – in 1870-1871 she and her ‘Seebach Company’ gave 170 performances in the USA.

After an engagement of many years in Hanover, she followed her husband, the singer Albert Niemann, to Berlin, eventually becoming a member of the Royal Court Theatre, where she played Lady Macbeth, her most successful Shakespeare role. Marie Seebach is regarded as one of the outstanding actresses of the German stage. She founded an acting school and established the ‘Marie-Seebach-Stiftung’, a welfare foundation which exists to this day as an old-people’s residence for artists in Weimar.

Shakespeare Roles

• Ophelia (Hamlet)
• Lady Macbeth (Macbeth)
• Desdemona (Othello)
• Juliet / Nurse (Romeo and Juliet)

Literature

Secondary Literature

• Gensichen, Otto Franz: Aus Marie Seebach’s Leben. Berlin, 1900.
• Gensichen, Otto Franz: Marie-Seebach-Memoiren. Charlottenburg, 1898.
• Meßner, Paul: Unsterbliches Gretchen. Eine Marie-Seebach-Biographie. Weimar, 1995.
• Schödel, Walther: Marie Seebach. Das Leben einer grossen Schauspielerin. Rudolstadt, 1959.

Album pages with this person

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