Italian postcard by Ed. A.Traldi, Milano, no. 863. Dorothea Thiele aka Tamara as Oberon in Ein Sommernachtstraum (Hans Neumann, 1925). Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
Solving a mystery
Our research journey began when German film collector Werner Mohr pointed out to Jean Ritsema, the cataloguer at the Ross Image Archive, that the name 'Tamara Karsavina' was attributed incorrectly to a card on the Ross Verlag site. The card was edited by the Italian company Traldi from Milan, number 863, and entitled Tamara. Mohr speculated at that time that the photo on the card was taken from a still from the 1924-1925 film Ein Sommernachtstraum, by Hans Neumann.
Using the terms 'Ein Sommernachtstraum' and 'Tamara', Ritsema came across a 1925 interview in the German journal Filmland, which is available on the website of the Media History Digital Library project. Jean shared a copy with Mohr. When he looked into the films referenced in the interview, Werner saw that an actress named Renée Pelar was connected with the Italian films, which were mentioned in the interview.
As Ritsema didn’t have much luck with additional searches, she reached out to Johan Delbecke in Belgium. Delbecke is known to be very effective at researching online and has helped her with other questions in the past, usually unrelated to his primary collection interest - Cléo de Mérode.
Pairing Pelar with Tamara in a search, Johan quickly found a posting on the German actress Dorothea Thiele on the site Steffi-line.de by Stephanie D’heil. This opened the door to solving the mystery as D’heil had made a connection between Thiele and Pelar, but also two other names: Thea Pellard, the actress mentioned in Filmland as acting in Friedrich Zelnik’s Eugen Onegin, and the mysterious ‘Tamara’.
As Stephanie D’heil writes, Dorothea Thiele, aka Tamara, aka Renée Pelar, aka Thea Pellard, was a German film actress of the silent era, who lived from 1896 to 1985.
Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano (Milan). Dorothea Thiele aka Renée Pelar. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
Italian postcard by Fotocelere, Torino (Turin). Dorothea Thiele aka Renée Pelar.
Dorothea Thiele
She was born on 23 March 1896 as Dorothea Elise Alma Gertrud Thiele in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. "Her Polish-born father, Rudolf Thiele, is a well-known painter; he also plays the piano well. (...) The mother is an unusually beautiful, elegant woman. Admired and idolised on all occasions that the parents diligently attended. (...) Dorothea's beauty is in no way inferior to that of her mother. She loves beautiful dresses and marvellous hats. She starts an apprenticeship as a milliner. Then gives it up. She learns shorthand and typing. She had no specific career goal." (This was cited by Stephanie D'heil from Alfred Häsler, Außenseiter-Innenseiter, 28 Porträts aus der Schweiz and translated by us).
On 5 April 1914, Dorothea married the Zürich architect Alwin Spengler in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Their son was born the same year on 19 October 1914, but the baby died just a few days after his birth. Through the court painter Professor Jung, the young woman met the actor and director Friedrich Zelnik. He offered her the part of Tatjana opposite him in the silent film Eugen Onegin (Alfred Halm, 1919), based on the eponymous verse novel by Alexander Pushkin, which Zelnik produced.
Dorothea used the stage name Thea Pellard for the film. From then on, she appeared in various silent productions under different pseudonyms. She acted as Renée Pelar in a series of Italian films, including La donna del mare / The Woman of the Sea (1922), based on a stage play by Henrik Ibsen. As Tamara, she acted in various German films of the 1920s, including Ein Sommernachtstraum / A Summer Night's Dream (Hans Neumann, 1925) and Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s famous film Die freudlose Gasse / Joyless Street (1925).
Probably in the mid-1930s, Thiele married the Swiss painter Peter Voltz (1910-1978) from Zürich. She withdrew with him to Sant'Abbondio in Ticino, southern Switzerland. Later, the couple moved to Locarno. The former film star dedicated herself to painting too, first on glass, later on canvas. She had a few exhibitions of her paintings, which could be described as 'naive art'. According to some sources, she converted to Buddhism. Tamara Voltz passed away in Klosters, Switzerland, on 4 August 1985, at the advanced age of 89.
Yet, IMDb, the website of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Filmportal.de, and even Stephanie D’heil identify 'Tamara' as the Russian-American actress and ballet dancer Tamara Geva, which raised new questions. However, Geva’s memoirs and descriptions of her Berlin times make it unlikely that she was involved in the Italian films by Pelar or the German films such as Ein Sommernachtstraum. Ritsema, therefore, contacted Jan-Christopher Horak, who is a noted specialist in German cinema. For information on Renée Pelar, she contacted EFSP collaborator Ivo Blom, who is an expert in Italian silent film. Consulting Häsler’s book cited on Steffi-line.de, Horak found confirmation of Mohr’s earlier assumptions that 'Tamara' alias Thiele acted not only as Oberon in Ein Sommernachtstraum but also as Pelar in various Italian films.
Italian postcard by Fotocelere, Torino.
Italian postcard by Fotocelere, Torino, no. 183.
Renée Pelar & Tamara
According to Vittorio Martinelli’s reference books, Il cinema muto italiano, Vols. 1920 and 1921-1922, Dorothea Thiele's first Italian film as Renée Pelar was Liberazione / Liberation (Jacques Creusy, 1920) with Mario Parpagnoli, but it was severely condemned by the Italian press, not for its main performances but for its ridiculous story. Critics saw the liberation rather in the possibility of leaving the cinema.
After this, Renée Pelar acted in Senza amore / Without Love (Arnaldo Fratelli, 1921), with Luciano Molinari and Dolly Morgan, largely shot in Tripoli, but unseen by audiences. Luigi Pirandello supposedly suggested the original title: Pantera di neve. Lastly, Pelar acted in the Ibsen adaptation La donna del mare / The Lady from the Sea (Nino Valentini, 1922). The latter film got praise for its photography, but the Italian press thought Ibsen unfit for Italian cinema.
According to Filmportal.de, as ‘Tamara’, Thiele also acted as Cora, the girlfriend of the villain Rawlinson (Robert Scholz), in all four episodes of the German serial Die Jagd nach dem Tode / The Hunt for Death (Karl Gerhardt, 1921), starring Nils Chrisander and Lil Dagover: Die Jagd nach dem Tode, Der Mann im Dunkel, Die verbotene Stadt and Die Goldmine von Sar-Khin, all produced by Erich Pommer for Decla Film. She also acted in the Hans Land adaptation Das Mädchen aus dem goldenen Westen / The Girl of the Golden West (Hans Werckmeister, 1922), starring Georg Alexander, and (not mentioned by IMDb) Die Tragödie einer Liebesnacht / The Tragedy of a Night of Love (Franz Osten, 1923), with Dary Holm.
In the 1925 interview in Filmland, Thiele (as ‘Tamara’) described her former film career. The films she mentions are those under the pseudonyms of Thea Pellard and Renée Pelar, plus her role as Oberon under the name of Tamara in Ein Sommernachtstraum. She doesn’t mention the two other German films with Tamara, Die Freudlose Gasse / Joyless Street (G. W. Pabst, 1925) and Gräfin Plättmamsell / Countess Plättmamsell (Constantin J. David, 1926). Possibly, they were produced after the interview was written. So their attribution remains with a question mark, although she probably did them too.
Filmportal also equates 'Tamara' with Tamara Tolstoï, aka Countess Tolstoï, the latter actress in Die freudlose Gasse. Yet, whether Thiele also worked under the pseudonym Tamara Tolstoï remains uncertain and is not likely. After Ivo Blom recently wrote about this research at Flickr, IMDb updated its lemma on Dorothea Thiele, but the database mistakenly included the films of another actress, Erna Thiele. IMDb also has separate lemmas on Renée Pelar and Thea Pellard.
Italian postcard by Fotocelere. Collection: Jean Ritsema.
German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1239/1, 1927-1928. Dorothea Thiele aka Tamara. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.
We’d like to thank all who contributed to this ‘expedition’. First of all, our thanks to Stephanie D'heil for her remarkable website Steffi-line.de. Then we thank Jean Ritsema, Werner Mohr, Johan Delbecke, and Jan-Christopher Horak for their research. Many thanks also to EFSP collaborators Marlène Pilaete and Ivo Blom for their postcards and Ivo for his research and his notes on the expedition. Sources: Stephanie D'Heil (Steffi-Line - German), Media History Project, Ross Verlag Postcards, Vittorio Martinelli (Il cinema muto italiano Vols. 1920 and 1921-22), Alfred Häsler ('Außenseiter-Innenseiter, 28 Porträts aus der Schweiz', Verlag Huber Frauenfeld, 1983), San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and IMDb.
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