Charlotte Wolter
“Her ”cassamagnet“ status was based less on her art than on her victorious beauty, for Timișoara had a strong garrison, and when Wolter performed, the officers came to the theater.“[1] She came to Vienna, where Johann Nepomuk Nestroy hired her as an extra and for small roles at the Carl Theater.
He arranged a guest performance in Brno for her, which was a success and opened her door to Victoria Theater [de] in Berlin where she starred as queen Hermione in the Shakespeare’s Winter's Tale and in Hamburg.
She applied for an engagement at Berlin Court Theater but artistic director Botho von Hülsen turned her down saying: “I can't hire you - you're too small for me!” In 1862 Laube invited her to give a guest performance at the Burgtheater where she performed Legouvé’s and Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur, Jane Eyre, Schiller’s Maria Stuart and Countess Ruthland in Graf von Esser.
[2] Overcoming her painful career start, she was not ready to submit and share the field of tragic heroines with younger actresses and saw then as artistic competition, which they were.
“The management of the Imperial and Royal Hofburg Theater, as well as the great actress Charlotte Wolter, who, however, thinks and acts very pettily in "certain" things, is doing everything in their power to spoil the position of this talented and important artist at the Burgtheater.
Her repertory included Medea, Sappho, Lady Macbeth, Mary Stuart, Preciosa, Phèdre, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Jane Eyre and Messalina, in which character she was immortalized by the painter Hans Makart.
The grotesque aspect of her extravagant grief, of course, lay in the fact that our old, semi-literate cook had never once been to that distinguished theatre herself, and had never seen Charlotte Wolter either on stage or in real life, but in Vienna a great Austrian actress was so much part of the common property of the entire city that even those entirely unconnected with her felt her death was a catastrophe.” Attribution: Media related to Charlotte Wolter at Wikimedia Commons
