Judith Malina

Judith Malina (June 4, 1926 – April 10, 2015) was a German-born Jewish-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.

Early life and education

Malina was born in Kiel, Weimar 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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref name=eehieht>Template:Cite news</ref> In 1929, at the age of 3, she immigrated with her parents to New York City.<ref>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</ref>

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 Nazism.<ref name="ref1">Template:Cite book</ref>

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.<ref>Judith Malina in: A Memoir of Valeska Gert and the Beggar Bar, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Volume 41, Issue 3, Sep. 2019, p.1-16</ref><ref>Valeska Gert in her autobiography I Am a Witch, 1968</ref> 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.").<ref>Judith Malina: The Piscator Notebook. London: Routledge Chapman & Hall 2012, p. 185</ref> Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

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."<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

She also appeared in Pacino's Looking for Richard. Malina's other roles in cinema include Rose in Awakenings (1990) and Granny 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 the TV series The Sopranos in 2006 as a nun, the secret mother of Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri. She also has a significant supporting role in the film Enemies, A Love Story (1989), based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Living Theatre and its founders were the subject of the 1983 documentary Signals Through The Flames.

Malina is the subject of the documentary Love and Politics (2012) by Azad Jafarian and took part in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary New York Memories (2010). Von Praunheim's film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2010 and Jafarian's premiered in 2012 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Theater scholar Richard Schechner said: Template:Blockquote

Personal life and death

File:Judith Malina on the grounds of the Actors Fund Home in Englewood NJ circa 2014 photographed by Jay Dobkin.jpeg

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.<ref name="NYT1">Template:Cite news</ref> They co-directed the Living Theatre's activity in the Middle East, Europe and the United States, until Reznikov's unexpected death in 2008.<ref name="NYT1" />

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.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> Malina died in Englewood, New Jersey, on April 10, 2015.<ref name=nyt>"Judith Malina, Founder of the Living Theater, Dies at 88", The New York Times, April 11, 2015.</ref>

Awards and honors

In 1996, Malina was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Whittier College.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2007, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Lehman College.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> In 2008 she received the Ordem do Mérito Cultural from the government of Brazil.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

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, 1969 (New York: Random House, 1972)
• Le Legs de Cain: trois projets pilotes (with Julian Beck) (1972)
• Frankenstein (Venice Version) (with Julian Beck) (1972)
• Sette meditazioni sul sadomachismo politico (with Julian Beck) (1977)
• Living Heist Leben Theater (with Imke Buchholz) (1978)
• Diary excerpts Brazil 1970, Diary of Bologna 1977 (1979)
• Poems of a Wandering Jewess (book of poetry; Paris: Handshake Editions, 1982)
• The Diaries of Judith Malina: 1947–1957 (New York: Grove Press, 1984)
• Love & Politics (book of poetry; Detroit: Black & Red, 2001)
• The Piscator Notebook (London/NYC: Routledge, 2012)
• Full Moon Stages: Personal Notes from 50 Years in the Living Theatre (book of poetry; New York: Three Rooms Press, 2015)<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Filmography

Judith Malina film and television credits

Year	Title	Role	Notes	Template:Abbr
1957	The Bachelor Party	Long-hair Village intellectual (uncredited)	Theatrical film	Template:Citation needed
1958	Narcissus	Narration (voice)	Theatrical film
1963	Flaming Creatures	The Fascinating Woman	Theatrical film
1963	Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man	Template:Unk	Theatrical film
1968	Après la Passion selon Sade	Template:Unk	Theatrical film
1968	Wheel of Ashes	Crazy Woman Preaching	Theatrical film
1968	Candy	Bit Part	Theatrical film
1969	Love and Anger	Template:Unk	Theatrical film. Segment: "Agonia"
1975	Dog Day Afternoon	Mother	Theatrical film
1986	No Picnic	Template:Unk	Theatrical film
1987	Radio Days	Mrs. Waldbaum	Theatrical film
1987	The Secret of My Success	Mrs. Meacham	Theatrical film
1987	China Girl	Mrs. Monte	Theatrical film
1989	American Stories, Food, Family and Philosophy	Template:Unk	Theatrical film
1989	The Equalizer	Old Woman	Episode: "Heart of Justice"
1989	Enemies, A Love Story	Masha's Mother	Theatrical film
1990	Awakenings	Rose	Theatrical film
1991	The Addams Family	Grandmama	Theatrical film
1993	Household Saints	Carmela Santangelo	Theatrical film
1994	Men Lie	Template:Unk	Theatrical film
1997	The Deli	Vincenza Amico	Theatrical film
1998	Music from Another Room	Clara Klammer	Theatrical film
2000	Snow Day	Grammy
2003	Nothing Really Happens: Memories of Aging Strippers	Tillie Hirsch	Theatrical film
2006	The Sopranos	Aunt Dottie	Episode: "The Fleshy Part of the Thigh"
2010	When in Rome	Umberto's Grandma	Theatrical film
2010	New York Memories		by Rosa von Praunheim
2013	Over/Under	Catherine	Television film
2019	The Forgiveness of Judith Malina			<ref name="FJM">Template:Cite web</ref>

Accolades

• 2003, induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• 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".<ref>2008 IT Award Winners Announced Brian Scott Lipton, TheatreMania, September 23, 2008</ref><ref>2008 Honorary Awards Recipients Doug Strassler, New York Innovative Theatre Awards, September 15, 2008</ref>
• 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).

External links

• The Living Theatre official site
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• Judith Malina diaries, 1947-1959, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
• Living Theatre records, 1945-1991, held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
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