Regine Lutz was a natural actress. That must have been the case, otherwise famous theater men of their time would not have hired the young Swiss woman on the spot. First there were Oskar Waelterlin and Kurt Hirschfeld, who kept her there in 1947 after an audition at the Schauspielhaus Zurich and cast the then 18-year-old as Arabella in Lessing’s “Miss Sara Sampson”. Then they came to the attention of Bertolt Brecht, who was preparing the premiere of his play “Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti” in Zurich in 1948. As a test, he gave the professor’s daughter, who was born in Basel on December 22, 1928, a poem of his to read aloud; she was supposed to recite it like a person “who has never spoken rhymes before.” Regine Lutz seems to have convinced him with her sober naivety: Brecht gave her the role of the cowgirl in “Puntila” and took her to the Berliner Ensemble in 1949, where she became the ensemble’s young star. She stayed at the house until 1960, celebrated as one of the great Brecht actresses – the last of her kind.
Brecht actress Regine Lutz dies at the age of 94 – culture
