Dolly, Lotte and Maria

Plot

The first of the three women portrayed in this documentary is the innovative dancer/mime/choreographer Lotte Goslar (1907-1997), who worked with Mary Wigman in pioneering modern dance, and choreographed productions by Bertolt Brecht. She developed her own style of expressive dance. In 1933 she left Germany and toured in Europe. Disgusted with Germany's Nazism she exiled herself in the United States. In one of her most famous solos, Grandma Always Danced, she was seen, first, as a baby, then as a bride, a mother and as an old woman. Goslar became a popular teacher of mime and body movement for actors. In the late 1940s, she taught in Los Angeles, where one of her pupils was Marilyn Monroe.

The second woman, Dolly Haas (1910-1994), was a popular film actress who worked in Dolly macht Karriere (1930) under the direction of Anatole Litvak. The rise of Nazism compelled her to move to England with her first husband, the director Hans Brahm (later John Brahm). In 1936 she signed a contract with Columbia, but after an 18-month wait for the right role, she returned to the stage in New York enjoying a successful Broadway career and thereafter also sporadically appeared on television. Her only major movie role was in the high-profile I Confess (1953) directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her second husband was the Broadway caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.

Lastly, Maria Ley-Piscator (1899–1999), who began her career as a dancer in Berlin and Paris and later turned to choreography. She helped stage several productions with Max Reinhardt, including A Midsummer Night's Dream. She immigrated with her third husband, the theatrical director Erwin Piscator, to US, where they founded the Dramatic Workshop at New York's New School for Social Research in New York City. She subsequently directed stage productions off-Broadway and in Europe.