Trivia

Son of actor and director and manager of the Burgtheater in Vienna Hugo Thimig, brother of actress Helene Thimig and actor Hermann Thimig.

Stage and film actor/director with long residencies at the Vienna Burgtheater and the Theater in der Josefstadt. From 1959, served as director of the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna.

He continued to work as a film director and in 1959 took over from his sister Helene (who retired on grounds of age) the direction of the prestigious Vienna Max Reinhardt Seminar, as the School of Drama of the Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst had been renamed after World War II, in honour of the great Austrian director.

He married in 1929 the actress Christl Mardayn, and in 1945 Helene Rauch.

With the transition to the sound film he was able to continue his career like his siblings.

At the end of 1944 Thimig's superiors ordered him to shoot a politically tendentious film in Berlin. Karl Hartl, the director of production at Wien-Film, advised him however just to "clear off", which he did. He withdrew to the small town of Wildalpen, where the family owned a holiday home, while Hartl covered for him and reported him sick.

He was not only an actor, but he began to direct as well. At first in the Theater in der Josefstadt, and later also in the film industry.

From 1949 he performed again on stage in Vienna, alternating between the Burgtheater (of which he became an honorary member) the Theater an der Josefstadt and the Wiener Volkstheater.

At the Theater in der Josefstadt he performed besides his father, his sister Helene Thimig and his brother Hermann Thimig so that the Viennese public used to call it the "Thimig-Theater".

The actor Hans Thimig came from a family which was a traditional acting one. His father Hugo Thimig (1854-1944) was a well-known actor, although his brother Hermann Thimig (1890-1982) and his sister Helene Thimig (1889-1974). So it doesn't surprise that also Hans Thimig was seized by the acting bacillus.

From 1918 to 1924 he was engaged - under his real name - at the Burgtheater, and then moved to the Theater in der Josefstadt, managed by his future brother-in-law Max Reinhardt.

His daughters Henriette Thimig and Heidemarie Thimig are actresses too.

After the war Thimig became mayor of the small town Wildalpen for a short time, as he was the only man in the place without a National Socialist record.

Hans Thimig remained loyal to the Theater in der Josefstadt until 1942. It was also thanks to him that the theatre survived the National Socialist period relatively "Nazi-free".

Hans Thimig died in 1991 in Vienna, aged 90. He left his body to science, but a memorial stands in the Vienna Zentralfriedhof.

Thimig saw to it that the director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Heinz Hilpert, also took over the running of the Josefstadt Theatre ( Max Reinhardt too had managed both theaters simultaneously). When Max Reinhardt died in American exile in 1943, Hilpert together with the Thimig brothers, despite the Nazi regime, organized a memorial event in the Theater in der Josefstadt.

He was the youngest son of the Burgtheater actor Hugo Thimig, and he performed without any training as a 16-year-old under the pseudonym "Hans Werner" at the Wiener Volkstheater.