Helene Weigel was a distinguished German actress. She was the second wife of Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

, and together they had a son Stefan Brecht

Stefan Brecht

Stefan Brecht was a German-born American poet, critic and scholar of theater.The son of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht and actress Helene Weigel, Stefan Brecht was born in Berlin. He chose to stay in the United States when his family, who had arrived in Santa Monica, California in 1941,...

 (3 November 1924-13 April 2009) and daughter Barbara Brecht-Schall (born 28 October 1930).

The daughter of a Jewish lawyer, she became a Communist Party

Communist party

A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

 member from 1930 and Artistic Director of the Berliner Ensemble

Berliner Ensemble

The Berliner Ensemble is a German theatre company established by playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel in January 1949 in East Berlin...

 after her husband Brecht's death in 1956. Among the Brecht roles she is most noted for creating: Pelagea Vlassova, The Mother

The Mother (play)

The Mother is a play by the German modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht. It is based on Maxim Gorky’s 1906 novel of the same name.It was written in collaboration with Hanns Eisler, Slatan Dudow and Günter Weisenborn from 1930–31 in prose dialogue with unrhymed irregular free verse and ten initial...

of 1932, Antigone

Antigone (Brecht play)

Antigone, also known as The Antigone of Sophocles, is an adaptation by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht of Hölderlin's translation of Sophocles' tragedy. Written in 1947, it was first performed at the Chur Stadttheater in Switzerland in 1948, with Helene Weigel in the lead role....

in Brecht's version of the Greek tragedy, the title role in his civil war play Señora Carrar's Rifles

Señora Carrar's Rifles

Señora Carrar's Rifles is a one-act play by the twentieth-century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, written in collaboration with Margerete Steffin. It is a modern version of the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge's play Riders to the Sea . The play's setting is re-located to Spain during the...

and, most famously, the iconic Mother Courage

Mother Courage and Her Children

Mother Courage and Her Children is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht with significant contributions from Margarete Steffin...

.

Between 1933 and 1947, as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, she was seldom able to pursue her acting craft - even during the family's six-year stint in Los Angeles. It was only with the foundation of the Berliner Ensemble in the German Democratic Republic

German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

in 1949 that the brilliance of Brecht's theatre began to be recognised worldwide. She died in 1971, still at the helm of the company, and many of the roles that she created with Brecht are still in the theatre's repertoire today.

External links

• Berliner Ensemble
• Jennifer Marston Willia, Biography of Helene Weigel, Jewish Women Encyclopedia