Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926) is an American theater and film actor, writer, and director, who is one of the founders and leaders of The Living Theatre.
Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of an aspiring actress mother and a rabbi father. In 1929, she moved with her parents to New York City, where, except for long tours, she has lived ever since. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social ...
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Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926) is an American theater and film actor, writer, and director, who is one of the founders and leaders of The Living Theatre.
Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of an aspiring actress mother and a rabbi father. In 1929, she moved with her parents to New York City, where, except for long tours, she has lived ever since. Interested in acting from an early age, she began attending the New School for Social Research in 1945 to study theatre under Erwin Piscator. Malina was greatly influenced by Piscator's philosophy of theatre, which was based on Bertolt Brecht's principles of "epic theatre" but went further than Brecht in departing from traditional narrative forms, and which saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop—though Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism.
Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, when she was 17. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in...
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