Svend Aggerholm

Biography

Svend Aage Alexander Reumert Aggerholm sprang onto the boards of Aarhus the very day he turned twenty-three, 11 September 1898, at Dagmar Theatre, and never looked back. For the next dozen years he moved steadily up the Copenhagen ladder: Dagmar until 1902, Folketeatret until 1908, then the glittering foyer of Det Ny Teater until 1910. That year he and his wife, actress Ellen Aggerholm, crossed the North Sea and spent four seasons enlivening London stages with Danish flair. Home again in 1914, he formed his own troupe and set the provinces humming—trundling wagons of scenery through Jutland’s market towns, over the strait to Norwegian hamlets, staging Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem, Holberg’s Fruentimmerskolen, and the buoyant comedy Kaj og Kate wherever an assembly hall had lights to dim. In 1917 the curtain rose on his first appointment as artistic chief of Odense Teater; he held the post until 1921, then left to tour and recite. His “Dickens Evenings”—one man, one book, a thousand voices—became a cottage industry, packing parish halls from Skagen to Sønderjylland. Odense called again in 1930. Aggerholm answered, steering the theatre until cancer stilled his voice on 2 December 1940.