Judith Malina

Early life and education

Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Jewish parents: her mother, Rosel (née Zamora), was a former actress, and her father, Max Malina, a rabbi in the Conservative denomination. In 1929 at the age of three, she immigrated with her parents to New York City.

Her parents helped her see how important political theatre was, as her father was trying to warn people of the Nazi menace.

Except for long tours, she lived in New York City until her move to the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social Research in 1945 to study theatre under Erwin Piscator. Malina was greatly influenced by Piscator's philosophy of theatre which was similar to Bertolt Brecht's principles of "epic theatre" but went further in departing from traditional narrative forms. Piscator saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop (“Theatre interests me only when it is a matter of interest to society.”); Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.

Career

In 1963 they had to close the Living Theatre because of IRS charges (later proved false) of tax problems, and Malina and Beck were convicted of contempt of court, in part because Judith defended Julian wearing the garb of Portia from The Merchant of Venice – and tried to use a similar argument. They received a five-year suspended sentence, and decided to leave the U.S. The company spent the next five years touring in Europe and creating increasingly radical works, culminating in Paradise Now. They returned to the US in 1968 to present their new work. In her book The Enormous Despair (1972), part of her series of published diaries, Malina expressed the sense of danger and unfamiliarity she felt on returning to the U.S. in the midst of the social upheavals of the late 1960s.

In 1969 the company decided to divide into three groups. One worked on the pop scene in London, another went to India to study traditional Indian theatre arts, and the third, including Malina and Beck, traveled in 1971 to Brazil to tour. They were imprisoned there on political charges for two months by the military government.

After Beck's death from cancer in 1985, company member Hanon Reznikov, who had become Malina's lover (they married in 1988), assumed co-leadership of the Living Theatre company. In 2007 it opened its own theater at 21 Clinton Street in Manhattan. In April 2008 Reznikov suffered a stroke and while hospitalized died of pneumonia on May 3 of the same year at the age of 57.

Malina appeared occasionally in films, beginning in 1975, when she played Al Pacino's mother in Dog Day Afternoon. Using her for the role was Pacino's idea, said its director, Sidney Lumet. Lumet recalls that tracking her down was difficult, as she had moved from New York to Vermont. "I had no idea of what to expect," said Lumet. "I didn't even know whether she'd want to do a 'commercial' film. Well, let me tell you, she is an actress. Totally professional. She also had no money and we had to pay her fare from Vermont, but she walked in and was perfect."

She also appeared in Pacino's Looking for Richard. Malina's other roles in cinema include; Rose in Awakenings (1990) and Grandma Addams in The Addams Family (1991). She had major roles in Household Saints (1993) and the low-budget film, Nothing Really Happens (2003). She appeared in an episode of long-running TV series The Sopranos in 2006 as a nun, the secret mother of Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri. Malina is the subject of a 2012 documentary by Azad Jafarian titled Love and Politics. The film premiered at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. Malina also has a significant supporting role in the well-received film Enemies, A Love Story (1989), in which she acted alongside Lena Olin, Ron Silver and Anjelica Huston. Some of Malina's artistic qualities were described by theater scholar Richard Schechner:

The thing about Judith Malina is that she is indefatigable, unstoppable, erupting with ideas. Malina is long-living, long-working, optimistic, and by the second decade of the 21st century girlish and old womanish at the same time. She survives and she bubbles, both.

Personal life

Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, in 1943, when she was 17 and he was a student at Yale University. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in political theatre. In 1947 the couple founded The Living Theatre, which they directed together until Beck's death in 1985.

Malina's and Beck's marriage was non-monogamous. The bisexual Beck had a long-term male partner, as did Malina. In 1988, following the death of Julian Beck in New York City, she married her long term partner Hanon Resnikov. They co-directed the Living Theatre's activity in the Middle East, Europe and the United States of America, until Resnikov's unexpected death in 2008. The last address of the Theatre was 21 Clinton Street, Manhattan.

Death

Judith Malina died in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 10, 2015. She was survived by her two children by her marriage to Beck.

Accolades