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Celia Lovsky

Austrian-American actress From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Celia Lovsky
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Celia Lovsky (born Cäcilia Josefina Lvovský, February 21, 1897 October 12, 1979) was an Austrian-American actress. On the original Star Trek she played the Vulcan matriarch T'Pau, and on The Twilight Zone she played the aged daughter of an eternally youthful Hollywood actress.

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Early years

Lovsky was born in Vienna,[1] daughter of Břetislav Lvovský [cs], a minor Czech opera composer, and his wife Vallee, a cellist.[2] She studied theater, dance, and languages at the Austrian Royal Academy of Arts and Music.[3]:32

Life and career

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Lovsky married journalist Heinrich Vinzenz Nowak in 1919.[3]:496 By 1925, they were apparently estranged and she was romantically involved with playwright Arthur Schnitzler.[3]:32 She later moved to Berlin, where she acted in the surrealist plays Dream Theater and Dream Play by Karl Kraus.[3]:39 There, in 1929, she met Peter Lorre, who had seen her in a production of Shakespeare's Othello near Vienna.[3]:32 The couple traveled to Paris, London, and the United States. Lovsky was instrumental in bringing Lorre to the attention of Fritz Lang, leading eventually to Lorre's appearance in the film M (1931) directed by Lang.[3]:37 They lived together for five years before their marriage.[citation needed] They married in 1934 and divorced in 1940[2] or 1944.[4]

After the couple settled in Santa Monica, California, Lorre had not wished Lovsky to work, believing he should be the breadwinner and she should remain at home. For the rest of Lorre's life, she was his publicist, manager, secretary, financial planner, nurse and confidant.[3]:87 After their divorce, she started taking roles in American movies and television. She made a name for herself playing roles including the deaf-mute mother of Lon Chaney in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957) with James Cagney and as Apache Princess Saba in the 1955 film Foxfire starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler.

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Kurt Kasznar and Lovsky in The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

As she grew older, she was given dowager roles, such as a Spanish matriarch in an episode of Bonanza titled "The Spanish Grant" (1960) and Have Gun Will Travel titled "The Man Who Wouldn't Talk" (1958) (with Charles Bronson), Romany matriarchs, elderly Native American women such as in the Wagon Train episode "A Man Called Horse", expatriate Russian princesses, and a role as the widowed mother of Reinhard Schwimmer, one of the victims in the film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967). Her final movie appearance was of the "Exchange Leader" in Soylent Green (1973). She delivers the final confirmation to Edward G. Robinson's character Sol about Soylent Green's true ingredient.

One of her television appearances were in the Twilight Zone episode "Queen of the Nile" (1964), in which she played the elderly daughter of a never-aging actress (played by Ann Blyth); another was as the Vulcan matriarch T'Pau who presides at Mr. Spock's wedding in the Star Trek episode "Amok Time" (1967).[5]

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Death

On October 12, 1979, Lovsky died at her home in Los Angeles, aged 82.[4]

Partial filmography

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References

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