Sibylla Blei

Sibylla Blei was an actress, the daughter of the writer and translator Franz Blei. She trained at the reformist Freie Schulgemeinde Wickersdorf and made her stage debut in 1914 at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin, appearing in Hofmannsthal, Wedekind, Shakespeare and Hauptmann. She is widely credited, including in her own biographical entries, with creating the Guardian of the Threshold in the Vienna premiere of Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1919, though no source records any vocal training and the role is scored for soprano. She also appeared on screen, in Lubitsch's Madame DuBarry (1919) and Scaramouche (1923), and worked as a fashion model and a translator. She married and divorced the industrialist Ernst von Lieben, and from 1937 lived in Portugal with her partner Sarah Halpern, working in ceramics and running a cosmetics business.