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Personal Information for Ida Kaminska - Printer Friendly Page
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Personal Information for
Ida
Kaminska
Born: September 4, 1899
Died: December 31, 1980
Occupations:
Actresses, Performers, Singers, Television Acting
Subjects:
Judaism, Motion Pictures, Performing Arts, Television, Theater, Theater, Yiddish, Women, World War, 1939-1945-Refugees, Yiddish Language, Yiddish Theatre, Drama
Biographical Information: Ida Kaminska was born on September 4, 1899, in Odessa, Russia. She was the daughter of the great Polish Yiddish actress, Ester Rachel Kaminska, and Abraham Yitzhak Kaminska, an actor, playwright and director. She first appeared on stage at age six, and by the time she was fifteen she was singing in the operetta theater run by her father. By eighteen, she had directed her first play. Kaminska became a leading actress in her mother's Yiddish theater company, Warsaw's Kaminska Theater, and she toured Russia with them in 1918. She also toured Poland with Zygmund Turkow's Warsaw Jewish Art Theater and performed in Paris, Brussels, and Lithuania in 1931.
Kaminska then founded the Ida Kaminska Theatre, where she became both a star of the stage and a director. When the Germans occupied Poland, she was the managing director of the Jewish State Theater in Lvov. Kaminska spent the war years in Russia, where she organized another theatre company. After the war she returned to Warsaw, creating the Jewish State Theatre of Poland. In 1967, the troupe toured the United States and Kaminska remained in America after it ended. She later moved to Israel.
Best known for her work in Eastern Bloc Yiddish theatre, Kaminska also made a few films over her long and distinguished career. She appeared in Polish films from the mid 1920s through the mid 1930s, starred in the film "Angel Levine" with Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte. She was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award in 1967 for the role of Lautmanova in the Czech film, "The Shop on Main Street." Throughout the decades of her busy career, Kaminska produced more than seventy plays, acted in 150 roles, translated seventy plays into Yiddish, dramatized several novels and wrote two original scripts. She was married to theatre manager Zygmund Turkow and later to Meir Melman. Ida Kaminska died in 1980.
Related Collections (2)
Related Collections
Celia Adler Papers
Ida Kaminska Papers
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