Katharina Schratt

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Katharina Schratt (11 September 1853 – 17 April 1940) was an Austrian actress who became known as “the uncrowned Empress of Austria” because of her long friendship with Emperor Franz Joseph.

She was born in Baden bei Wien, the daughter of a stationery dealer, and had two brothers. From age six she loved theatre, but her parents tried to keep her from acting and sent her to a boarding school in Cologne. She eventually learned acting in Vienna and made her stage debut at 17. In 1872 she joined the Royal Court Theatre in Berlin for a short time, then moved to Vienna’s City Theatre and became a leading actress. She also performed abroad, including a tour in New York, before returning to Vienna’s Hofburgtheater. Schratt was one of Austria’s most popular actresses until she retired in 1900 after a disagreement with the theatre director.

In 1879 she married Nikolaus Kiss von Ittebe, a Hungarian nobleman, and they had a son, Anton. The couple soon separated. Schratt’s acting impressed Franz Joseph in the early 1880s, and she was invited to perform for visiting Tsar Alexander III. She became the Emperor’s companion, though it is not clear if their relationship was romantic. Empress Elisabeth is said to have encouraged the relationship, and she even had a portrait of Schratt made.

After Elisabeth’s assassination in 1898, Schratt and Franz Joseph stayed close, with one interruption in 1900–01. The Emperor supported her lavish lifestyle, giving her mansions in Vienna and Bad Ischl. When her husband died in 1909, Schratt inherited Palais Königswarter in Vienna. She remained friends with other nobility and lived a quiet life after the Emperor’s death in 1916.

In the 1930s journalists pressed her for memoirs, but Schratt refused, saying she was an actress, not a writer. She grew very religious in her later years and visited the tombs of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth daily, while also supporting animal shelters. She died in Vienna in 1940 at the age of 86 and was buried at Hietzing Cemetery.