Ruth Landshoff

Ruth Landshoff-Yorck (1909–1966) was a German-American actress and writer. She was born in 1909 in Berlin as Ruth Levy, later Ruth Landshoff, to engineer Edward Levy and opera singer Else Landshoff. She came from a middle class Jewish family and grew up in Berlin. Her uncle was the publisher Samuel Fischer. She was given the name Ruth Yorck von Wartenburg after marrying Count David Yorck von Wartenburg in 1930. They divorced in 1937.

Landshoff's first appearance in a film was in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), in which she played the role of Ruth. She also made a brief appearance in The Search (1922), a silent film by Carl Theodor Dreyer. After attending Reinhardt's acting school, Landshoff turned to stage acting. She made appearances in Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna before giving up acting. From 1926 to 1930, before marrying Yorck, she was in a relationship with playwright en screenwriter Karl Vollmöller who was 26 years her senior. One of her closest friends in Berlin was Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

In 1933 she emigrated from Nazi-Germany to France, then to the United Kingdom, then to Switzerland and finally in March 1937 to the USA, where she worked as a writer and translator in New York City. She wrote novels, poems, and magazine columns. Though she was a native German speaker, she quickly learned to write in English. Landshoff died during a theater performance of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss on January 19, 1966.

Ruth Landshoff-Yorck was the subject of a biography, with fourteen photographs, "Die vielen Leben der Ruth Landshoff-York" ("The many lives of the Ruth Landshoff-York") by Thomas Blubacher. Publisher: Insel Verlag Gmbh (8 Aug. 2015) Language: German

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