Special Collections and Archives Finding Aids

Biographical Note: Biography and Career of Tilly Losch

Ottilie Ethel Losch, born in Vienna on November 15, 1907, was the daughter of Otto Emil and Eugenie (Dreucker) Losch. From her first dance appearance at the age of six, the little girl literally grew up in the embrace and discipline of the Vienna Imperial Opera ballet school. Encouragement from Opera Director Richard Strauss led to important roles and opportunities for further study. Tilly became a full member of the ballet corps at the unusually young age of fifteen, and by the time she was twenty was one of Vienna's most popular dancers. She made appearances as chief ballerina, gave solo recitals in Paris, Prague and Budapest, and developed a reputation for innovation and modernism. On occasion, she also performed minor dramatic roles at the Burgtheater. It was at this time that Tilly received an invitation from acclaimed theater director Max Reinhardt to dance the role of First Fairy in his 1927 Salzburg Festival production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, an event which opened a new chapter in her career.

In the course of that momentous summer, Max Reinhardt, then at the pinnacle of his fame, asked the young dancer to join select members of his Berlin and Salzburg ensembles for an upcoming guest tour in the United States. While visiting America had long been a dream, strict contractual commitments to the Vienna State Ballet precluded any sort of independent career. After her request for an extended leave of absence was denied, Tilly reluctantly resigned from the Vienna Ballet and ultimately traveled to New York City with Reinhardt's troupe for a highly successful 1927-28 theater season. This tour was an important political as well as cultural event, since it marked the first official visit to America of a German-speaking theatrical group since 1914. Relying on his instinct for recognizing new talent, Reinhardt asked Miss Losch to choreograph as well as dance for these productions. Never having choreographed before, Tilly was understandably overwhelmed when the renowned German theater director requested that she arrange all the dances for A Midsummer Night's Dream. “You can do it—talent is talent!” Reinhardt reassured her. Indeed, she did it so well that she was asked to choreograph the dance sequences for other tour productions such as Everyman and Danton's Death. In later life Miss Losch acknowledged that she had been fortunate in having received the necessary support for her dancing, acting and painting efforts early on. Again, it was Reinhardt who encouraged Tilly's acting ability by casting her in the lead role of the Nun in his 1932 London revival of Vollmoeller's mystery play The Miracle. Moreover, changes were made for this production specifically to accommodate her talents. Tilly was given the only spoken lines in the play--the Lord's Prayer--which she uttered with great pathos just before she died and the curtain fell.

Miss Losch's choreography had many elements in common with the directorial style of her mentor, Max Reinhardt. In the process of creating dance forms, she first immersed herself totally in the music. As she listened with her “inner” ear, dreamlike movement sequences began to take visual form. Figures in her mind moved in response to the music, generating kaleidoscopic patterns seen first in the imagination before being worked out concretely in detailed steps. Miss Losch favored the human component in artistic production and allowed her dancers considerable leeway to develop their own feelings about the music and articulate their individual styles. She expected to make choregraphic changes during rehearsals once the dancers had learned their steps and began to improvise artistically. Herself a dramatic dancer, Tilly created dances with sweeping dramatic themes and tended to focus more on the emotional significance of the dance for artist and audience alike than on accurate steps and flawless technique.

While dancing at the Salzburg Festival during the summer of 1927, another of Miss Losch's dreams came to fruition. She had caught the eye of English impresario Charles B. Cochran, who at the time managed some of the great names in the world of entertainment. On the basis of an impromptu private audition, he engaged her on the spot for a series of dance appearances the following spring. Tilly's career was about to take off in new directions. She made her London debut in Noel Coward's musical review This Year of Grace in 1928, and the following season appeared in Charles B. Cockran's revue Wake Up and Dream, in which she choreographed and starred in several ballet and dance numbers, among them "What is This Thing Called Love" (actually choreographed by Ballanchine), which became one of Cole Porter's most popular songs. This successful production was subsequently brought to the United States. In the New York production, Tilly also performed a solo number entitled "Arabesque" or "Dance of the Hands," set to music by Ravel, that found particular favor with New York audiences. In America Tilly was kept busy choreographing the ballet for The Gang's All Here (1931) and dancing in the company of Fred and Adele Astaire in The Bandwagon (1931), during which she wore out a $50 pair of handmade ballet shoes at each performance. She made repeated trips to England to perform in Reinhardt productions, and danced in Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus at Covent Garden, with Bruno Walter conducting.

In the early 1930s, Miss Losch was featured in several memorable dance recitals with actor Harald Kreuzberg at New York's Columbus Circle Theater. These avant-garde performances showcased for New York audiences the artistic modernism then prevalent in Central and Western Europe. Tilly's first husband, financier and collector Edward James, who befriended both Dali and Magritte, created several notable dance productions expressly for her, particularly Les Ballets 1933. Although having only a short Paris run, Les Ballets nevertheless had a seminal influence on American dance in that it featured collaborators such as composer Kurt Weill, singer Lotte Lenya, and choreographer George Balanchine, all of whom would go on to make a profound impression on American culture. Another of Tilly's triumphs was her creation of the dancing Anna to Lotte Lenya's singing Anna for Berthold Brecht's The Seven Deadly Sins. She danced with the Russian Ballet under George Balanchine, where she shared the post of premiere danseuse with Toumanova, and also performed in Goyescas with the Ballet Theater. Deeply involved in dance most of her life, Tilly once commented that she never considered it work but rather a labor of love.

In England she had appeared in straight dramatic roles as well—Everyman, Danton's Death, and Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. Indeed, at this time Tilly's personal popularity was said to equal that of Sarah Bernhardt in her prime. French poet Jean Cocteau called her the greatest performing artist since Eleonora Duse, who at the end of a distinguished acting career had made notable guest appearances during the first decade of the twentieth century in Reinhardt's Berlin theaters. Hollywood film producers, too, were impressed with Miss Losch's exotic beauty as much as with her dancing and acting ability. She made several brief but promising screen appearances--as a dancing girl in The Garden of Allah (1936), as Lotus in The Good Earth (1937), and as a Native American dancer in Duel in the Sun (1946). Her stamina was legendary, as when she did over 300 retakes of her energetic dance routine in the course of two days' shooting of the latter film. She also did choreography for other Hollywood films like Scheherezade. Despite receiving fabulous salaries for these roles, Tilly was not particularly happy in the Hollywood dream factory. She recalled that it was a lonely, isolated life, with countless artists competing against each other for fame, all caught up in the “great American game of promise” and relying on fine words that rarely translated into action. Disenchanted, Tilly returned to the East Coast, where she danced briefly with the American Ballet, did summer stock in Connecticut, and landed an occasional role on Broadway.

Following a bout of depression and a lengthy recuperation at a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland, Tilly discontinued her dancing career, but soon felt the need for expression in another artistic medium. Having first tried her hand at watercolors, she began to paint seriously when other artists working on her portrait encouraged her to take up this endeavor fearlessly and without regard for consequences. Her prime mentor in this instance was John Spencer Churchill, Winston's nephew. Tilly's initial attempts resulted in a series of self-portraits in oil; she also painted likenesses of Anita Loos, Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Yet further encouragement and support came from celebrated British writer and designer Cecil Beaton, who likewise advised the fledgling artist not to let obstacles and adverse criticism stand in her way. The first one-person exhibition of her paintings, held at New York's Bignou Gallery in the spring of 1944, revealed an artist of considerable grace and skill somewhat reminiscent of the French primitivist school, with a hint of Grandma Moses.

Art critics noted that Miss Losch captured on canvas some of the fluid and rhythmic aspects of dance, evoking a mystical sort of romanticism that has been referred to as “evocative magic” and “a gift of divination.” Her paintings have overt autobiographical significance and often feature dancing themes. Tilly doesn't use live models, but starts from a preconscious dreamlike state in which imagined or half-remembered figures emerge—sometimes happy, often somber—and unpredictably burst into movement on her canvases. The backgrounds of her paintings, too, represent dreamed-up vistas or landscapes out of her past—old Imperial Vienna, postwar deprivation in the Austrian Republic, waning aristocratic England, the effects of war on children. Saga in Five Movement allegorically portrays everywoman's life in five discrete stages. Out of My Life reveals a series of evolving sketches—children dancing in the street, adolescents responding to awakening adult emotions through dance, and mature female figures on a gallows and stretched upon a cross. One painting in this series entitled “Adam and Eve in New England” portrays a boy and girl seeking but at the same time evading one another. Religious longings, too, pervade these works, as when the “Virgin of Mariazell” offers to shelter humanity's children in her wide blue robe of grace.

One astute critic commented on Miss Losch's painting as follows. “Although many noted stage performers are lured into trying painting or sculpture, few succeed... perhaps because enthralling thousands of people requires a `letting go' which, carried over to painted canvas, seems to the critical eye to show lack of control, blatancy, and a curiously unpleasant monomania or exhibitionism.” Miss Losch seems to be an exception to the rule, since “she has never been just a performing artist... but a choreographer too. Never the exhibitionist, she was always shy—onstage and off.” Tilly's paintings have been purchased over the years by various arts organizations including the Tate Gallery in London, Philadephia's Barnes Museum, the Sam Lewison Collection in New York, the Leonard C. Hanna Collection in Cleveland, the Maitland Collection in California, the C. Bliss Family, as well by as individual collectors Ina Claire, John Gunther, Thornton Wilson, Conger Goodyear, I.V. Patchevich, George S. Kaufman, and Paul Mellon.

Tilly's first marriage to bon vivant Edward James ended contentiously in 1934, when she sued for divorce but lost, amid great scandal. Five years later she married the Earl of Carnarvon, son of the discoverer of King Tutankhamen's tomb, then a major in the British Army. Almost overnight Tilly Losch from Vienna became Lady Carnarvon, an English Countess. Her close friends at one time were the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton and Pavel Tchelitchev. Due to her precarious health, her émigré status, and the dangers of war, Lord Carnarvon in 1940 shipped his wife off to the United States. Tilly's newly acquired social status proved to be of great advantage in American society and in the furtherance of her career. As might be expected, the marriage did not survive wartime dislocation and separation and ended in divorce eight years later, except that in this instance the couple seems to have remained on cordial terms. Tilly lived out her remaining years commuting between London and New York, where she died of cancer in 1975. The Earl of Carnarvon was among only a handful of mourners at her modest Catholic funeral service, an event which thirty years earlier might well have filled Westminster Cathedral to overflowing. In her will Tilly directed that a major portion of her personal effects—papers, photographs, sketches and paintings—be deposited with the newly instituted Max Reinhardt Archives at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Perhaps she hoped that the undiminished reputation of her former mentor and friend might yet ensure her a measure of fame for posterity.

Herbert Poetzl
May 2000