Trivia

In a 1977 television show, the interviewer tactfully suggested that by the dawn of the 1950's Gert was perhaps not so well remembered as before. With typical self-deprecating humor and bluntness typical for Berliners, she exclaimed, "Not so well remembered? I was totally forgotten!".

During World War I she adjoined a Berliner dance group and created first dance satires. Finally it followed an engagement at the Deutsches Theater where she had a huge success in eccentric roles for avant-garde plays.

Gert wrote articles for such magazines as ''Die Weltbühne" and the "Berliner Tageszeitung".

German-Jewish actress and dancer of eccentric personality and dark, aquiline features. Her radical interpretations of modern dance are now regarded as having been ahead of her time. She first studied dance from the age of six and took acting lessons from Alexander and Maria Moissi. She performed in cabaret and pantomime in Berlin and at the Munich Kammerspiele during the 1920's and also acted in silent films. She was forced to leave Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Her career in Germany ended in 1933 because she was Jewish. From then on she danced in Paris, Budapest and London. Upon her return to Germany in 1950, she managed a similar operation in Berlin, the 'Hexenkueche' (Witch's Kitchen'), before being rediscovered for the screen by Fellini.

Gert played "Pijma" in the successful Italian film Juliet of the Spirits (1965).

She emigrated to the USA in 1938 where tried to get work in vain. She lived from the welfare of a Jewish refugee committee, beside it she worked as plate cleaner and nude model. In 1947 she returned to Europe where she managed the cabaret "Hexenküche", in the 60's she made her comeback for the film.

In 1978, Werner Herzog invited Gert to play the real estate broker "Knock" in his remake of F.W. Murnau's classic film ''Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)'' The contract was signed on 1 March 1978 but Gert died just two weeks later, before filming began.

On 18 March 1978, neighbors and friends in Kampen, Germany, reported she had not been seen for four days. When her door was forced in the presence of police she was found dead. She is believed to have died on 16 March. She was 86 years old.

By 1941, she had opened the Beggar Bar in New York. It was a cabaret/restaurant that was filled with mismatched furniture. Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and Jackson Pollock worked for her. Tennessee Williams also worked for her for a short time as a busboy, but was fired for refusing to pool his tips. Gert commented that his work was "so sloppy".

World War I had a negative effect on her father's finances, forcing her to rely on herself far more than other bourgeois daughters typically might. As World War I raged, Gert joined a Berliner dance group and created revolutionary satirical dance. Following engagements at the Deutsches Theater and the Tribüne in Berlin, Gert was invited to perform in expressionist plays in Dadaist mixed media art nights. Her performances in Oskar Kokoschka's Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller's Transformation (1919), and Frank Wedekind's Franziska earned her popularity.

Her exile from Germany sent her to London for some time, where she worked both in theatre and film. In London, she worked on the experimental short film Pett and Pott, which long stood as her last movie. While in London, she wed an English writer, Robin Hay Anderson, her second marriage.

In 1970 she receive the award "Filmband in Gold" for lifelong achievement in German film.

Gert could be by turns grotesque, intense, mocking, pathetic or furious, performing with an anarchic intensity and artistic fearlessness which also recommended her to the Dadaists.

Valeska Gert analysed the limits of societal conventions and then expressed with her body the insights that she gained from her analyses.

In the 1920s, Gert premiered one of her more provocative works, titled "Pause". Performed in between reels at Berlin cinemas, it was intended to draw attention to inactivity, silence, serenity, and stillness amid all the movement and chaos in modern life. She came onstage and literally just stood there. "It was so radical just to go on stage in the cinema and stand there and do nothing," said Wolfgang Mueller.

In 1915, she studied acting with Maria Moissi, and dance with Rita Sacchetto.

She hired the 17-year-old Georg Kreisler in 1938 as a rehearsal pianist to continue focus on cabaret work.

Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work, she began taking dance lessons at the age of nine. This, combined with her love of ornate fashion, led her to a career in dance and performance art.

When she danced an orgasm in Berlin in 1922, the audience called the police.