Robert Freitag

Robert Peter Freytag (7 April 1916 in Vienna – 8 July 2010 in Munich), known professionally as Robert Freitag, was an Austrian-Swiss stage and screen actor and film director. Life Freitag was the son of the Swiss opera singer Otto Freitag (Otto Freytag). He was trained as an actor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. During the Nazi era, he went to Switzerland, where he was active as an actor at the Schauspielhaus Zürich (Zürich playhouse). In 1945, he married the German actress Maria Becker, who had studied acting in Vienna and who since had been at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, which had benefitted from the presence of German émigrés during the Second World War. Becker became a Swiss citizen by marrying Freitag. In 1949, Freitag began participating in the Salzburg Festival. Later he performed, among other places, at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and the Hamburger Kammerspiele, both in Hamburg. With his wife Maria Becker and the German stage actor Will Quadflieg, he founded the Zürcher Schauspieltruppe in 1956 in Zürich, where he was also a part-time administrator. That troupe performed throughout the German-speaking countries and in the United States.