A Danish Actress and Her Conception of the Part of Lady Macbeth

Summary

In the foyer of the Royal Theatre of Copenhagen there is a life-size statue of a woman, standing at her ease, contemplative, with no trace of passion, mild, unsmiling, a woman of the world. She is the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg. This is how she liked to see herself at the height of her fame when the statue was made, about the middle of the last century (see Plate II A).

Who was she? Even now, a hundred years after she withdrew from the theatre, she still excites our curiosity, and she has recently been the subject of a brilliant biography by the Danish stage historian, Robert Neiiendam, who has thrown much light on her personality.

For more than a generation, she dominated the Danish stage. Her beauty enchanted the sculptor, Thorvaldsen, who had her picture on his wall. Kierkegaard, the philosopher, who was a keen theatre-goer, spoke of her soulful eyes. The great of the land courted her; the ladies of Copenhagen imitated her ingenious dresses; and Lumbye, the composer, wrote a Johanne Luise Waltz, which you can still hear played in the pleasure gardens of Tivoli. Before she died she wrote the story of her life, one of the most fascinating autobiographies in our literature, and as indispensable for any student of Danish theatre history as, say, Bernard Shaw's Our Theatres in the Nineties to an Englishman.