 | You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2024)Click [show] for important translation instructions.
|
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(November 2013) |
Mary Losseff (also Mara Loseff); (13 March 1907, Vladivostok – 3 July 1972, London) was a Russian-born British singer and film actress.
Losseff was the stage, screen and life partner of the Austrian tenor Richard Tauber from 1929 to the mid-1930s, and Tauber's close friend until his death in 1948. She was the muse for his 1934 operetta Der singende Traum and his three songs titled An eine schöne Frau, and she also starred opposite him in numerous productions. She made commercial recordings of one solo (Peter, Peter) and several duets with Tauber. She co-starred in four films: The Land of Smiles (1930), Liebeskommando (1931), Bretter, die die Welt bedeuten (1935) and The Sky’s the Limit (1938). Her voice was a high, light and sweet soprano – not big or great, but charming, true and technically assured.
Losseff's early life was comfortable. Her father owned a factory and the family were relatively well off. With the October Revolution, however, the family were forced to flee to Japan, where they remained for two years, surviving because of the father's They then moved on to Berlin in 1921. Little is known of this period except that Mary bore an illegitimate child, Dimitri, in 1927. This did not affect her plans to make a career on the stage. She took lessons from Bertha Niklas-Kempner and sent Dimitri to boarding school from the age of three for the whole of his childhood. She made her debut at Rudolf Nelson’s Review in 1929, singing ‘Peter, Peter’. This period is described by her then-lover, the pianist and composer Peter Kreuder, in his book Nur Puppen habe keine Tränen.
Tauber was in the audience at the Nelson Review and fell in love with Mary, and her voice, at first sight; he felt that she was the singer for whom he had long been searching to star in his planned operetta Der singende Traum. Initially through his influence, she secured major roles in several productions, including Paul Abraham's Viktoria und ihr Husar , Karl Millöcker's Die Dubarry, Jaromír Weinberger's Frühlingsstürme, Franz Lehár’s Paganini, Abraham's Ball im Savoy , Emmerich Kálmán’s Gräfin Maritza and of course Der singende Traum. She received critical acclaim, indicating that Tauber's faith was justified. At this time, Mary and Richard were considered a couple, and were expected to marry.
However, by 1933, Richard had been hounded from Germany, because his father was Jewish. Mary stayed by his side; they went first to Vienna and then to London. Mary took part in some London productions, but never quite hit it off with British audiences. She had also started drinking heavily, which affected her ability to perform. Domestically and professionally, Mary declined rapidly. Richard detested alcohol, and the nature of the relationship changed. When he married the non-singing British actress Diana Napier in 1936, Mary was devastated and began drinking even more heavily. Mary's last major role was in the South African production of Tauber's Land of Smiles in 1939, but during this tour she was replaced by her understudy Jose Malone. Richard was astonishingly loyal to her until his death. Many of his 60-odd letters repeat the same refrain: 'I wish that everything could have been different'. He also carried on giving Mary a weekly allowance and sending her additional money through the post whenever he could. Despite Richard's never-wavering constancy and repeated attempts to persuade her to stop drinking, Mary virtually disappeared from public performance, barring the occasional concert fixed up by friends. The last documented appearances by her were at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens in 1950.
Mary married the actor Brian Buchel in 1938 but the marriage did not succeed, and they separated long before divorce was granted in 1947. She moved to Exmouth in 1943, without Brian, then back to London to a flat in Queensway, Bayswater, in 1944 and remained there on and off until 1948, the year of Richard's death. She also bought a farm in Ireland, which was run by her son Dimitri and which she occasionally visited. She tried to bring her mother, brother and sister to Ireland and to England, but failed, and indeed she never saw her family again. After Richard died, her financial circumstances became desperate for a while, but she found a new partner by the name of Charles Holt, and when that relationship ended, lived with a Willy Bolt in Exmouth. Her National Registration Identity card gives her address as Bryn Cottage, Malltraeth, Anglesey in 1951, and in the same year she married Hugh J Owen in Anglesey. There is no record of a divorce, but by 1955, she was back in London, living in Acton and then Ealing. (There is no evidence that she lived at any time in Soho, sharing a room with a labourer who used the room by day which she used by night, as Diana Napier Tauber claimed.) In 1959, she met Vassia Myronovsky and moved into his house in the Hammersmith district of London, where she stayed until her death of cancer of the lung in July 1972.
Mary possessed a loving, homely quality until her old age, although her alcoholism gave rise to a terrible instability. She remained in touch with her son. He never forgave her for withholding information about his father, but later ancestry DNA tests of her grandchildren reveal that the unnamed father of Dimitri was 'central European Jewish', which casts her silence into a different light. She was extremely moved when her grandchildren were born. Her constant drinking and difficult behaviour became too much for Vassia in the end and their relationship deteriorated; during her terminal illness, she was tended by her daughter-in-law. She was cremated at North East Surrey Crematorium in Sutton, Surrey, where her ashes are interred.
She also recorded on 4.9.34 two solos from 'Der singende Traum', issued on Odeon 0-25208.
Mary Losseff at IMDb
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| People | |
Franz Lehár was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow.
Richard Tauber was an Austrian lyric tenor and film actor. He sang the tenor role in number of operas, including Don Giovanni by Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Cyril Joseph Trimnell-Ritchard, known professionally as Cyril Ritchard, was an Australian stage, screen and television actor, and director. He is best remembered today for his performance as Captain Hook in the Mary Martin musical production of Peter Pan. In 1945, he played Gabriele Eisenstein in Gay Rosalinda at the Palace theatre in London, a version of Strauss's Die Fledermaus by Erich Wolfgang Korngold in which he appeared with Peter Graves. The show was conducted by Richard Tauber and ran for almost a year.
Hedwig "Vicki" Baum was an Austrian writer. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel, one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical.
Séverine is a French singer.
Johannes Mario Simmel, also known as J. M. Simmel, was an Austrian writer.
Michael Holm is a German singer, musician, songwriter and record producer. He is primarily known as a singer of Schlager music. Although his first appearance in the hit parade was in 1962, he had his first big hit in 1969. "Mendocino", the German adaptation of a song by the Sir Douglas Quintet, was the biggest selling single that year in (Germany). The record was released in September 1969, reached number three for five weeks, selling over a million copies. Ariola presented him with a gold record in October 1970.
Jarmila Novotná was a Czech lyric coloratura soprano and actress. From 1940 to 1956, she was a star of the Metropolitan Opera.
Marcel Wittrisch was a popular German operatic tenor.
Artur Semyonovich Berger was an Austrian-Soviet film architect and set designer. He was active in Austria between 1920 and 1936, during which time he worked on about 30 feature films.
"Yours Is My Heart Alone" or "You Are My Heart's Delight" is an aria from the 1929 operetta The Land of Smiles with music by Franz Lehár and the libretto by Fritz Löhner-Beda and Ludwig Herzer. It was for many years associated with the tenor Richard Tauber, for whom it was written. The aria is sung by the character of Prince Sou-Chong in act 2. An American version of the show opened on Broadway in 1946 starring Tauber but it soon closed as Tauber had throat trouble.
Margarethe Arndt-Ober was a German opera singer who had an active international career during the first half of the twentieth century. A highly skilled contralto, Ober enjoyed a particularly long and fruitful association with the Berlin State Opera from 1907 to 1944. She also was notably a principal singer at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City between 1913 and 1917.
Alice Mary Wolkowicka, known professionally as Diana Napier, was an English film actress.
Benno Vigny was a French-German screenwriter, novelist, songwriter, and librettist. Born into a Jewish family in France and raised in Vienna, Austria, Vigny's first significant work as a writer was the libretto for Robert Winterberg's operetta Fasching in Paris (1910). After serving in the French Army during World War I, he began a relationship with Marie-Louise Caussat, the mother of French songwriter Charles Trenet. She divorced her first husband in 1920, and married Vigny in 1922.
Otto Wallburg was a German actor and Kabarett performer. He was a prolific film actor during the late silent and early sound era. He was arrested by the Nazis when they occupied the Netherlands and was killed in Auschwitz in October 1944.
Peter Paul Kreuder was a German-Austrian pianist, composer and conductor.
The Land of Smiles is a 1930 German operetta film directed by Max Reichmann and starring Richard Tauber, Mary Losseff and Hans Mierendorff. It is an adaptation of the operetta The Land of Smiles composed by Franz Lehár. Lehár himself appeared in the film in a small role. It was shot at the Emelka Studios in Munich with sets designed by the art director Hans Jacoby.
Maria Luise Thurmair née Mumelter was a German Catholic theologian, hymnodist and writer. She contributed the lyrics of many hymns when the Catholic hymnal Gotteslob was first published in 1975.
Frieder Weissmann was a German conductor and composer.
Hans Bund, also Jack Bund, was a German pianist, conductor, composer and arranger in the field of light music.
