Jenny Jugo

Biography

A lively brunette, dimple-cheeked actress with a tom-boyish, unaffected manner who briefly flirted with stardom in a string of romantic comedies during the mid-1930's. The daughter of a factory owner, Jenny was educated at a convent school in Austria. A short-lived marriage to the Italian actor Emo Jugo brought her to Berlin where she was spotted by the distinguished film producer Erich Pommer and subsequently signed to a contract with Ufa. Her comedic talents were not fully recognised until the first of her eleven films (Wer nimmt die Liebe ernst...? (1931)) under the direction of Erich Engel, who henceforth became her mentor. Jenny's forte was playing feisty, determined characters who tended to excel at oneupmanship. Her performance as Eliza Doolittle in Engel's adaptation of Pygmalion (1935) so enthused the author George Bernard Shaw that he offered her the opportunity to act in all of his plays on the stage in England. Jenny remained in Germany, nonetheless, and made several more hugely popular films with Engel, including Mädchenjahre einer Königin (1936), as a young Queen Victoria; The Night with the Emperor (1936) (several years later marrying her co-star, the actor Friedrich Benfer) and the musical comedy Nanette (1940). Though flourishing briefly as one of Ufa's top box office attractions, her star declined as the Third Reich began to favour Germanic-looking blondes. Jenny made only a couple of films after the war before retiring to her farm in Schönrain in Upper Bavaria. She was eventually honoured by the prestigious Filmband in Gold in 1971 for her contributions to German cinema. Confined to a wheelchair for the last two decades of her life, Jenny Jugo died in September 2001 at the respectable age of 97.