Carl Ebert

Carl Anton Charles Ebert (20 February 1887 – 14 May 1980), was an actor, stage director and arts administrator.

Ebert's early career was as an actor, training under Max Reinhardt and becoming one of the leading actors in his native Germany during the 1920s. During that decade he was also appointed to administrative posts, both theatrical and academic. In 1929 he directed opera for the first time, and during the 1930s established a reputation as an operatic director in Germany and beyond. A strong opponent of Nazism, he left Germany in 1933 and did not return until 1945.

Together with John Christie and the conductor Fritz Busch, Ebert created the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1934. Ebert remained its artistic director until 1959, though productions were suspended during the Second World War. In the 1930s and 1940s Ebert helped establish a national conservatory in Turkey, where he and his family lived from 1940 to 1947.

In his later years Ebert held administrative posts in Los Angeles and Berlin, and was a guest director at opera houses and festivals in Europe.

Ebert was born in Berlin, the son of a Polish father, Count Anton Potulicky, who was a government official in Berlin, and an Irish-American mother, Mary Collins, a music student. To keep it secret from her family that she had an illegitimate child, Mary Collins persuaded a fellow-student, Eileen Lawless, to be officially recorded as the boy's mother. He was given the name of Charles Lawless. His father rented rooms in the house of Wilhelm and Maria Ebert in Berlin. He persuaded the couple to take charge of his son. When the boy was seven years old the Eberts legally adopted him as their son. He was known as Charles Ebert from then until the First World War when he took a German form of his first name.

Ebert was educated in Berlin at the Friedrich Werder'sche Oberrealschule Berlin. From 1905 he trained for two years to be a banker, but in 1907 he gained a free place at Max Reinhardt's School of Dramatic Art in Berlin, and pursued a career in the theatre. While still a student Ebert played several major parts in Rheinhardt's productions at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin. While a member of Reinhardt's resident company at the Deutsches Theatre, Ebert married Lucie Splisgarth (1889–1981) in 1912. They had a daughter, who became a leading German actress and died in 1946, and a son, Peter, who became a stage director and theatre administrator. In 1914 Ebert was called up for military service, but after a year he was released at the instigation of the Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt, which was in urgent need of a leading actor. In the next seven years he played major roles for the Frankfurt company, and in 1919 he co-founded the Frankfurt Drama College. In 1923 he and his wife divorced. The following year she married the conductor Hans Oppenheim (later a colleague of Ebert at Glyndebourne), and Ebert married Gertrude Eck. All four remained on close terms with one another. Ebert's second marriage lasted for the rest of his life; he and Gertrude had two daughters and one son. Carl's grandson is Alex Ebert.

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