Maria Orska

Who was Maria Orska?

Maria Orska was an important actress of the German theater and cinema in the 1920s.

Maria Orska was born as Rachel Blindermann in 1893, of a Polish-Jewish family, in a city of Mykolaiv, not far from Odessa, in what is now Ukraine, at the time a part of Russian Empire. Just before World War I Maria Orska moved to Warsaw and from there she moved to Berlin in 1915, as Warsaw has been occupied by German army during the war. She spoke fluently Polish, German and Russian.

In Berlin, Maria Orska worked with Max Reinhardt and was famous for her parts in theater plays by Strindberg, Wedekind and Pirandello. She also gained national popularity in Germany for her film parts, although theater was always more important to her. Her first movie Dämon und Mensch was produced by Jules Greenbaum, one of the pioniers of the German cinema, who discovered cinema during his 20 years long stay in Chicago and migrated back to Germany in 1895. Most of her movies were produced by Alfred Maack, director and producer employed by Greenbaum. She was sometimes credited in films and film publicity materials as Maria Daisy Orska.