Augusta Burmeister

Biography

Born Auguste Murmeister in Hamburg in 1850, Augusta Burmeister first set footlights ablaze on German stages, then followed the glow across the Atlantic, conquering American playhouses in the 1870s. When movies began whispering their flickering stories, Lubin Films signed her in 1912; her screen baptism came opposite Arthur Ellery in the breezy one-reeler *Just Married*. Audiences soon recognized the sturdy warmth of her landladies and the flinty tenderness of her silver-haired mothers. Her signature portrait remains Marta Antonovitch, the ballet-world matriarch at the heart of Travers Vale’s 1917 *The Dancer’s Peril*, shared with Alice Brady and Harry Benham under World Film’s banner. She stepped away in 1920, but nine quiet years later returned for a single, elegant bow: as society dowager Mrs. Gertrude Mannheim in Paramount’s 1929 whodunit *The Greene Murder Case*, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring a young William Powell. Augusta Burmeister died in Los Angeles in 1934, aged 84, leaving behind a reel of memories as enduring as cellulose itself.