Bjørn Bjørnson

Biography

Vienna trained, Meiningen launched: in 1880 Bjørn Bjørnson stepped onto a German plank floor and never looked back. Engagements swept him from St. Gallen to Hamburg, then home to Christiania Theatre (1884-1893) where Oslo audiences first felt his monumental, lifelike thunder. Between 1899 and 1907 he captained the fledgling National Theatre as stage manager, returned to the same office from 1923-1927, and all the while continued to act and direct on the same boards. Ibsen’s lines fit him like chain mail, yet he reserved equal fire for his father Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s words—slipping into Paul Lange’s skin in “Paul Lange og Tora Parsberg” and embodying the calculating Tygesen in “Geografi og kjærlighet”. Guest stints carried him across Scandinavia and Germany; invitations from European capitals kept his luggage perpetually half-packed. At 52 the silent screen beckoned. In Denmark he wrote, directed and starred in four early films for Dania Biofilm, proving an old-stage lion could tame the flickering new medium. Spring 1942 found him gone at 83. His widow, the Jewish-born Eileen Cohn Bendix, fled west across the border; by autumn the Nazis had emptied Norway of its remaining Jews, shipping them to the death camps of Poland and Germany.