George Tabori - Biography

George Tabori (May 24, 1914 – July 23, 2007) was a Hungarian writer and theater director.

Life and career

Tabori was 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. His son Peter Tabori and again his son Kris Tabori both started the college Oxford. As a young man, 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 including Alfred Hitchcock's movie I Confess (1953).

In the late 1960s, 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 Cowen's Summertree. Two of Tabori's plays in English -- The Cannibals and Pinkville -- were produced by Wynn Handman at the American Place Theatre in New York City from 1968 through 1970.

In 1971, Tabori returned to Germany, where his new emphasis was theater work, and mainly worked in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. He was stepfather to actor Kristoffer Tabori during his marriage to Lindfors.

He died in Berlin, aged 93.

Marriages

• Ursula Höpfner (1985–2007; his death)
• Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori (1976–1984; divorced)
• Viveca Lindfors (1954–1972; divorced)
• Hannah Freund (1942–1954; divorced)

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