Elisabeth Bergner
Elisabeth Bergner (Drohobycz 1897 to London 1986) was among the most celebrated stage actresses of 1920s German-language theatre, and later a film star in Britain. György Rauscher painted her in Berlin in 1929, and the portrait is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 32).
Who she was
Born in Drohobycz in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, Bergner rose through the Vienna and Berlin stage to become one of the defining actresses of the Weimar theatre, closely associated with the director Max Reinhardt and with roles such as Shaw’s Saint Joan. She crossed into film with Der träumende Mund and, after leaving Germany as the Nazis came to power, built a second career in Britain, where Catherine the Great (1934) and Escape Me Never (1935, an Academy Award nomination) made her internationally known.
The Rauscher portrait
Bergner sat for Rauscher in 1929, in the same Berlin season as his Dietrich and Harvey portraits, and the portrait is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (see /klapka-muzeum). It is not among the 118 works of the printed 1935 estate catalogue, though Számadó records it and it appears in the photographs of the 1935 installation (/bibliography#szamado-2019, p. 32, p. 42).
The work record is at /works/elisabeth-bergner-1929.