Bjørn Bjørnson

Distinguished Norwegian stage actor, director, and manager. After theater studies in Vienna, he had his stage debut in Meiningen 1880 (Germany). Later he played in St.Gallen, Hamburg, and from 1884 to 1893 at Christiania Theater in Norway (now Oslo). From 1899-1907 and 1923-1927, he was stage manager at The National Theater in the same city, and he also worked as an actor and director at the same stage. As an actor he had many great performances in the monumental, realistic style, often in the plays of Ibsen, and in plays written by his own father, the famous writer and Nobel laureate in literature, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson; for example: Paul Lange in "Paul Lange og Tora Parsberg" and as Tygesen in "Geografi og kjærlighet". He also worked as an actor and director in Scandinavia and Germany, with many guest appearances all over Europe. At the age of 52 he was not afraid to try out the new medium, the motion picture industry, in Denmark he wrote scripts, and worked as an actor and director in at least four silent movies for the company Dania Biofilm. In the springtime of 1942 he died in the age of 83, and his third wife the Jewish Eileen Cohn Bendix, had to escape to Sweden. In November the same year all Jews still in Norway were captured and sent to concentration camps in Poland and Germany for extermination!