Marianne Hoppe

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Marianne Hoppe (26 April 1909 – 23 October 2002) was a German theatre and film actress. Born in Rostock into a wealthy family, she was privately educated on her father's estate and later studied in Berlin and Weimar, where she began acting. At 17 she performed with Berlin's Deutsches Theater under Max Reinhardt.

In 1935 she was hired by Gustaf Gründgens, and they were married from 1936 to 1946. Hoppe later described him as not her great love, but that love was work. During the 1930s and 1940s she had contacts with the Nazi elite, including being invited to dinner by Hitler. Her role in Der Schimmelreiter (The Rider of the White Horse, 1934) made her famous, and she was seen by many as having an Aryan appearance. She later called this period “the black page in my golden book.” She developed a distinctive acting method of carefully analyzing sentences and the use of language.

In 1946 her only child, Benedikt Johann Percy Gründgens, was born. After her divorce she achieved great success on stage, notably as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1950) and in avant-garde works by Heiner Müller and Thomas Bernhard, who became her partner in life. She worked with innovative directors such as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson and Frank Castorf.

Hoppe continued to act well into old age; her last stage appearance was in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui with the Berliner Ensemble in 1997. She died in Siegsdorf, Bavaria, in 2002 at age 93 from natural causes. Claus Peymann called her “German theater’s queen.” In a final interview she said, “I have a go at happiness every day. That takes discipline, a virtue every decent actor should have.”