George Tabori

Born in Budapest as György Tábori, a son of Kornél and Elsa Tábori. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944, but his mother and his brother Paul managed to escape the Nazis.

As a young man George Tabori went to Berlin but was forced to leave Hitler's Germany in 1935 due to his Jewish background. He first went to London, where he worked for the BBC and received British citizenship. In 1947 he immigrated to the United States, where he became a translator (mainly of works by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch) and a screenwriter (for example for Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 movie I Confess).

In the late 1960's Tabori brought his own and the work of Brecht to many colleges and universities. At the University of Pennsylvania he taught classes in dramatic writing which resulted in Werner Liepolt's "The Young Master Dante" and Ron Cowan's "Summertree". Two of Tabori's plays in English--The Cannibals and Pinkville--were produced by Wynn Handman at The American Place Theater in New York City from 1968 through 1970.

In 1971, Tabori returned to Germany, where his new emphasis was theater work. Since then he mainly worked in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.

He died in Berlin, aged 93.

Marriages

• Ursula Höpfner (1985 - 2007; his death)
• Viveca Lindfors (1954 - 1972) (divorced)
• Hannah Freund (1942 - 1951) (divorced)

References

Further reading

• Embodied memory : the theatre of George Tabori, 1999, ISBN 0877456860
• DramaContemporary : Germany : plays by Botho Strauss, George Tabori, Georg Seidel, Klaus Pohl, Tankred Dorst, Elfriede Jelinek, Heiner Müller, 1996, ISBN 0801852803

External links

• Obituary in The Times, 2 October 2007
• A list of plays in English
• A complete bibliography
• IMDb bio