Name Kathe Braun Role Film actress | Movies The Axe of Wandsbek | |
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Similar People Falk Harnack, Arvid Harnack, Otto Harnack | ||
Käthe Braun (November 11, 1913 – September 9, 1994) was a German stage and film actress. She was married to director Falk Harnack and acted in several of his films.
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Career
Katharina Braun was born in Wasserburg am Inn. After studying acting privately with Magda Lena in Munich, she had her first theater engagement at the Bavarian state theater, Cuvilliés-Theater. In 1938, she began working at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus and in 1941, at the city theater in Strasbourg, staying there until Goebbels closed all the theaters in August 1944.
After World War II, she returned to Munich and from 1947 to 1951, worked periodically at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. She also played major roles in East German DEFA productions, such as Stine Teetjen, the wife in Das Beil von Wandsbek, adapted from the book by Arnold Zweig and directed by her husband. Braun also became known for her role as the mother in several screen adaptations of Ludwig Thoma's five-part series of Scoundrel Stories (Lausbubengeschichten).
In 1952, her husband's first film was banned and he ran into trouble with the Communists and they left East Germany for the west. Braun began working at the Schiller Theater in West Berlin, as well as at the Schlossparktheater and elsewhere in West Germany. Among her roles were the lead in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Annchen in Max Halbe's Jugend, Rautendelein in Gerhart Hauptmann's Die versunkene Glocke, Electra in Eugene O’Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Gretchen in Goethe's Faust, the lead in Saint Joan, and several roles in German translations of Shakespeare; Hermia and Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Desdemona in Othello, Viola in Twelfth Night and Ophelia in Hamlet.