Bjørn Bjørnson

Biography

Vienna trained and German-honed, Bjørn Bjørnson stepped into the footlights for the first time at Meiningen in 1880, launching a career that would circle most of northern Europe. Engagements followed swiftly in St. Gallen and Hamburg before he settled at Christiania Theatre from 1884 to 1893, planting his flag in the city that would become Oslo. The National Theatre later claimed him twice: first as artistic captain from 1899 to 1907, then again from 1923 to 1927. Between those commands he never left the boards, acting and directing on the same stage, giving Ibsen’s tormented souls and his father Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Nobel-laureate prose a thunderous, larger-than-life voice. Audiences still spoke of his Paul Lange and his Tygesen long after the curtain fell. Guest contracts pulled him through Scandinavia and Germany, and European capitals repeatedly stamped his passport. At 52, when most stage lions grow conservative, he crossed the Øresund to Denmark, trading greasepaint for the flicker of early film. For Dania Biofilm he wrote, directed and acted in no fewer than four silent pictures, helping midwife cinema in the same decade it learned to walk. Spring 1942 closed his final act at 83. His widow, the Jewish-born Eileen Cohn Bendix, fled west across the border to Sweden; by November the Nazis had netted every remaining Jew in Norway and shipped them toward the camps of Poland and Germany.