Max Reinhardt

Born Maximilian Goldmann in Baden near Vienna, Max Reinhardt was brought up in an Orthodox family. After apprenticing with a banker, he began taking acting lessons, achieving local recognition for his performances. Invited by the director Otto Brahm to join the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Reinhardt moved to the city in 1894 and started his first company, Schall und Rauch (Sound and Smoke), in 1901. By 1905, having taken over direction of his own theater ensemble, Reinhardt won broad acclaim with his production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His new fame and financial success allowed him to purchase the Deutsches Theater, which he renovated and expanded. The theater’s company toured across Europe and the United States. Most notably, Reinhardt’s theater mounted an ambitious debut of Karl Vollmöller’s Das Mirakel in London in 1911, involving a cast and musical ensemble of nearly 1,700 performers. Reinhardt, who is primarily remembered as a director and producer, also wrote a number of his own shows and founded an acting academy in Berlin in 1905. He managed thirty different theaters and companies throughout his life, directed a number of films, and, after fleeing Nazi Germany for the United States, founded an acting school in New York and a theater workshop in Hollywood. He died in New York City.