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Vienna Burgtheater veteran Gert Voss dies

One of Austria's most beloved actors, Gert Voss, has died at the age of 72 after a short illness.

Published: 14 July 2014 11:04 CEST

Vienna Burgtheater veteran Gert Voss dies

Gert Voss. Photo: APA/Neumayr/MMV

Vienna's Burgtheater announced the news of his death but said his family did not want to reveal further details of his illness.

Voss, who was named "one of the best actors in Europe" by the London Times, was born on October 10th 1941 in Shanghai to German parents.

He was raised at Lake Constance and began his career as an actor in Germany. In 1986 he made his debut as Richard III at the Burgtheater in Vienna.

"In the following decades he wore the crown over and over again, either he was playing kings or beggars, Shakespeare or Beckett, Bernhard or Handke, Chekhov or Tabori", the Burgtheater's artistic director Karin Bergmann said on Monday in a statement.

"With Gert Voss the Burgtheater loses a virtuosic character actor with a phenomenal charisma", she added.

Voss was an honorary member of the Burgtheater and had received several awards.

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Top Paris theatre reopens as Covid occupy movement ends

A picture taken on January 26, 2011 in Paris shows the facade of the Odéon theatre. LOIC VENANCE / AFP

The protesters took down the banners they had slung across the facade of the venue in the Left Bank as they left at dawn, leaving just one inscribed “See you soon”.

“We’re reopening!,” theatre director Stéphane Braunschweig exclaimed on the venue’s website, adding that it was “a relief and a great joy to be able to finally celebrate the reunion of the artists with the public.”

The Odéon, one of France’s six national theatres, was one of around 100 venues that were occupied in recent weeks by people working in arts and entertainment.

The protesters are demanding that the government extend a special Covid relief programme for “intermittents” — performers, musicians, technicians and other people who live from contract to contract in arts and entertainment.

READ ALSO: Protesters occupy French theatres to demand an end to closure of cultural spaces

With theatres shut since October due to the pandemic, the occupations had gone largely unnoticed by the general public until this week when cultural venues were finally cleared to reopen.

The Odéon, which was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782, had planned to mark the reopening in style, by staging Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece “The Glass Menagerie”, with cinema star Isabelle Huppert as a former southern belle mourning the comforts of her youth.

But the protests scuppered the first five performances, with management saying the venue was blocked — a claim the protesters denied.

“What we wanted was for it (the performance) to go ahead, along with an occupation allowing us to speak out and hang our banners. We don’t want to stop the show,” Denis Gravouil, head of the performing arts chapter of the militant CGT union, said on Sunday.

Two other major theatres — the Colline theatre in eastern Paris and the National Theatre of Strasbourg — have also been affected by the protests.

France has one of the world’s most generous support systems for self-employed people in the arts and media, providing unemployment benefit to those who can prove they have worked at least 507 hours over the past 12 months.

But with venues closed for nearly seven months, and strict capacity limits imposed on those that reopened this week, the “intermittents” complained they could not make up their hours.

The government had already extended a year-long deadline for them to return to work by four months.

The “intermittents” are pushing for a year-long extension instead.

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