Hedwiga Reicher

Hedwiga Reicher (1884-1971) was a German-born stage and screen actress. She was best known for her role as Salomé in Oscar Wilde's play. In 1906, she moved to New York, where she performed on Broadway. Later, she worked in Los Angeles both on stage and in films by Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Borzage. One of her last films was Anatole Litvak's Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), the first anti-Nazi film from a major American studio.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4152-6. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. Caption: Give me the head of Jokanaan. After her lascivious dance, Salome, on instigation of her mother Herodias, asks her father Herod for the head of the imprisoned John the Baptist. The postcard was mailed in France.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4265-?. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.

Ernst Reicher's sister

Hedwiga Reicher was born as Hedwig E. Reicher in 1884 in Oldenburg, Germany. She was the daughter of actor-director Emanuel Reicher. Her brother was Ernst Reicher, a famous stage and screen actor, director, screenwriter and producer, known for his Stuart Webbs detective films. Another brother, Hans Reicher, was a sculptor, and her sister, Elly Reicher, was also an actress. She also had a half-brother, actor Frank Reicher.

Hedwig Reicher made her stage debut in October 1902, playing Zoë in Adolf von Wilbrandt's 'Der Meister von Palmyra' in Hamburg.

She remained in Germany for five more years before accepting an engagement to the Deutsches Theater (the Irving Place Theatre) in New York City in 1907. She decided to stay in the United States. In the summer of 1908, she briefly returned to Germany to perform alongside her father in Goethe's 'Iphigenia' at the Esperanto World Congress in Dresden.

Hedwig Reicher continued her theatrical work, now on Broadway in English-language plays. Her Broadway debut was 'On the Eve' in 1909. Then followed 'The Next of Kin' (1909-1910), Henrik Ibsen's 'The Lady from the Sea' (1911), 'The Thunderbolt' (1911), 'June Madness' (1912), August Strindberg's 'The Stronger' (1913), 'When the Young Vine Blooms' (1915) and 'Caliban of the Young Sands' (1916), in which she played Cleopatra.

In 1913, Reicher was hired to portray the mythological figure Columbia for the Woman Suffrage Procession, a suffrage parade on 3 March 1913, in Washington, D.C. According to news reports at the time, the group, which included 5000 to 8000 suffragists, marched from the US Capitol to the Treasury Building and was watched by a crowd of 500,000 (mostly men). Their intent was to upstage Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, due to take place the following day.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4265-3. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4265-4. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4265-5. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.

Janet Gaynor's mother

In 1916, Hedwig Reicher performed Oscar Wilde's 'Salome' at the Punch & Judy's Theatre in New York. The play depicts the attempted seduction of Jokanaan (John the Baptist) by Salome, stepdaughter of Herod Antipas; her dance of the seven veils; the execution of Jokanaan at Salome's instigation; and her death on Herod's orders. In 1901, within a year of Wilde's death, 'Salome' was produced for the first time in Berlin by Max Reinhardt in Hedwig Lachmann's German translation, with in the main roles Gertrud Eysoldt and Emanuel Reicher. It was a huge success. In 1907 or earlier, Hedwig Reicher performed the play in Germany. She played it again in New York in 1909 and in 1916. Then she moved to Los Angeles.

Hedwig Reicher's film debut came in A Lover's Oath (Ferdinand Earle, 1925), featuring Ramon Novarro and based upon the 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam', as translated by Edward Fitzgerald. The film was shot in 1920–1921 but not released in America until 1925. For its 1925 release by Astor Pictures, a small distributor, Milton Sills edited the 1922 film to emphasise the role of Novarro, who by then was a rising star. Novarro refused to cooperate with a request for some new closeups, and reportedly some older clips of Novarro were edited into the film. Despite this, the film was not well received by critics or the public and is now considered lost, although a few segments still exist.

From the mid-1920s on, Reicher plasyed small and supporting roles in Hollywood, often as an immigrant or a mother. She was the prison matron in Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1928) and Janet Gaynor's mother in Lucky Star (1929) by Frank Borzage. In September 1929, the artist was naturalised under a slightly different name, Hedwiga Reicher, as some Americans thought Hedwig was her last name.

In early 1939, Hedwiga Reicher appeared in the first decidedly anti-Nazi U.S. film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, 1939). The film stars Edward G. Robinson, Francis Lederer, George Sanders, Paul Lukas, and a large cast of German actors, including some who had emigrated from their country after the rise of Adolf Hitler. For this film, Reicher adopted the pseudonym Celia Sibelius for fear of Nazi reprisals against her family in Germany. Screenwriter John Wexley based his script on real events and the articles of former FBI agent Leon G. Turrou, who had been active in investigating Nazi spy rings in the United States before the war, quit the FBI and continued publishing articles on the topic that J. Edgar Hoover had largely ignored and tried to prevent from publication.

When World War II began, Reicher ended her film work. Her final, uncredited role was a nurse in the biopic Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (William Dieterle, 1940), based on the true story of the German doctor and scientist Dr. Paul Ehrlich (Edward G. Robinson) . Hedwiga Reicher continued to reside in Los Angeles and died there in 1971. She was 87. Hedwiga Reicher is often confused with Emmanuel Reicher's first wife. This was opera singer Hedwig Reicher-Kindermann (1853-1883, who died early of peritonitis. Hedwiga was never an opera singer.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4265-6. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.


German postcard by PH (Photochemie, Berlin), no. 4522-2. Hedwig Reicher in the play 'Salome' by Oscar Wilde. The postcard was mailed in France.

Sources: IBDB, Wikipedia (English and German) and IMDb.