Judith Malina (June 4, 1926 – April 10, 2015) was a German-born American actress, director and writer. With her husband Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 1960s. The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the 1983 documentary Signals Through The Flames.
Early life and education
Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Polish Jewish parents: her mother, Rosel (née Zamora), was a former actress, and her father, Max Malina, a rabbi in the conservative denomination.[1][2] In 1929, at the age of 3, she immigrated with her parents to New York City.[3]
Malina's parents influenced her deeply, leading her to find an interest in political theatre, as her father left Germany with his family, largely due to the rise of antisemitism in the late 1920s, after attempting to warn people of the threat posed by the Nazi regime.[4]
While not on tour, Malina lived in New York City until she moved to the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey in 2013.[5][6] From 1943 until 1945, Malina worked for Valeska Gert at the Beggar Bar. There she observed many of Gert's performances which influenced her later artistic approach.[7][8] 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. Piscator saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop ("Theatre interests me only when it is a matter of interest to society."[9]); though Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.[10]
Career
In 1947, Malina and her husband Julian Beck opened The Living Theatre, an experimental theatre company that focused on producing unconventional works by both American and European authors. By 1963, all three of the Living Theatre venues in New York had been shut down by authorities, in one instance by the IRS due to a tax dispute. The organization attributes this to "the difficulty of operating a unique, experimental enterprise within a cultural establishment ill-equipped to accept it", though the group returned to The United States in 1968.[11]
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 recalled that contacting her was difficult because she had moved 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."[12][13]
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.[14]
Personal life and death
Malina circa 2014
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. Beck and Malina had "two offstage children", Garrick and Isha.
Malina's and Beck's marriage was non-monogamous. The bisexual Beck had a long-term male partner as did Malina. In 1988, she married her long-term partner Hanon Reznikov.[15] They co-directed the Living Theatre's activity in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, until Reznikov's unexpected death in 2008.[15]
Malina died in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 10, 2015.[14]
Awards and honors
In 1996, Malina was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Whittier College.[16] In 2007, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Lehman College.[17] In 2008 she received the Ordem do Mérito Cultural from the government of Brazil.[18][19]
Selected bibliography
Entretiens avec le Living Théâtre (with Julian Beck and Jean-Jaques Lebel) (1969)
We, The Living Theatre (with Julian Beck and Aldo Lastagmo) (1970)
Paradise Now (with Julian Beck) (1971)
The Enormous Despair, Diaries 1968–89 (New York: Random House, 1972)
Le Legs de Cain: trois projets pilotes (with Julian Beck) (1972)
2008, annual Artistic Achievement Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Awards. This honor was presented to Malina by Olympia Dukakis on behalf of her peers and fellow artists of the Off-Off-Broadway community "in recognition of her unabashed pioneering spirit and unyielding dedication to her craft and the Off-Off-Broadway community".[22][23]
2009, the Edwin Booth Award from the Doctoral Theatre Students Association of the City University of New York.
Other awards include the Lola d'Annunzio award (1959); Page One Award (1960); Obie Award (1960, 1964, 1969, 1975, 1987, 1989, and 2007); Creative Arts Citation, Brandeis University (1961); Grand Prix du Théâtre des Nations (1961); Paris Critics Circle medallion (1961); Prix de L'Université de Paris (1961); New England Theater Conference Award (1962); Olympio Prize (1967); and a Guggenheim fellowship (1985).
^The Piscator Notebook by Judith Malina, Routledge, 2013, p. 3: "Germany fell upon evil days, and my father, foreseeing the disaster approaching for the Jewish people, emigrated with my mother and me, in 1929, to New York City." Text in Google Books
^Fliotsos, Anne; Wendy Vierow (2008). American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. University of Illinois Press. p. 258. ISBN978-0-252-03226-4.
^Valeska Gert in her autobiography I Am a Witch, 1968
^Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall 2012, p. 185
^Trousdell, Richard; Malina, Judith (January 1, 1988). "The Director as Pacifist-Anarchist: An Interview with Judith Malina". The Massachusetts Review. 29 (1): 22–38. JSTOR25089945.
