Ossip Runitch

Ossip Runitch (1889-1947) was a Russian-Jewish silent film actor, producer and stage director.

Also known as Ossip Runitsch, Osip Runich and Giuseppe Runitsch

Biography

According to Wikipedia[], he was born Ossip Iliych Runitsch (Russian: Осип Ильич Рунич) in 1889 in St. Petersburg, Russia, of an assimilated family from Vitebsk. However, Russian film historians believe that his surname was actually Fradkin. In a late 1920s interview for example, he stated that he was adopted by a Serbian engineer at the age of three. That's how he came by his Slavic surname. In the 1920s, he had a Yugoslav passport.

He began his acting career at the St. Petersburger Eremitage theatre and was soon in demand as a stage actor, then went on to become a star of Russian silent cinema in the period 1915-1919, appearing in a number of silent films including Molchi, grust... molchi ("Be silent, sorrow ... be silent") and Posledneiye tango.

In 1919 , after the Russian Civil War, he fled Russia for Italy, where he acted in a number of films before moving to Germany to work in German films. Among the better known were Danton (1921), Die Bestie im Menschen (1920) and Düstere Schatten, strahlendes Glück (1924). He also continued working in operas and stage plays (e.g. in 1921 and again between 1925 and 1928 in Paris).

His adoption enabled him to live outside the Pale of Settlement. He thus did not speak Yiddish and did not have anything to do with Jewish art until the 1920s, when he began to take part in Yiddish theatre performances in Germany and Latvia.

In 1925 he married Nina Pavlishcheva, a courtier ballet dancer, and by the late 1930s, they were living in Riga, Latvia, where he was part of a Russian theatre company (possibly known as the Russian Drama Theatre). As a full-time employee he acted and produced plays for Jewish theatre as well. (See for instance https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/yiddish/id/37/).

It seems that, being aware of the impending Second World War, he accepted an invitation from his local Jewish friends to tour South Africa in 193*. He ended up staying in South Africa, working in theatre and opera.

He passed away in Johannesburg, South Africa on 6 April 1947.

Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance

Runitch was among the pioneers of professional Yiddish theatre in South Africa and one of the earliest professional opera producers in the country.

In 1943 Runich produced a play called Soviet Wife for the benefit of the South African Society for Cultural relations with the USSR, starring in it with his wife.

(According to the Wikipedia[1] and IMDb[2] entries on Runitch, he "became a founder of one of the first professional theatre companies in a country. Besides, he produced operas for the State Theatre in mid-1940s." Both these statements are patently wrong and need to be rectified: there had been numerous professional companies in the country since the late 19th century, many of them professional, and the first 'State Theatre' theatre in the country - the National Theatre Organization - was only founded in 1947, the year of his death.)

Sources

Personal correspondence from Boris Gorelik. (15 June, 2019)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ossip_Runitsch

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0750294/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

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