Born Today March 19: Betty Nansen

1873-1943

Danish actress Betty Nansen was born Betty Anna Maria Müller on this day in Copenhagen. Nansen was primarily a theater person, but she did appear in a handful of silent films in the teens. She made her stage debut in 1893 in the city of her birth and by the mid-1890's she was a solid fixture in the theater scene, becoming a national star of the time. Though her film career, such as it was, is recorded as being a product of the U.S., she actually made her film debut domestically in 1913 in a Nordisk short melodrama During the Plague, but she is in no way the star of the film, that accolade went to Rita Sacchetto, a German actress of Italian descent.  The "U.S." designation of her film career is a misnomer in any case, as she did not in fact make her American film debut until 1915 when she was cast in the lead role of The Celebrated Scandal, a Fox production co-directed by J. Gordon Edwards and James Durkin. In the time between her film debut and her American film start, she appeared in Danish productions directed August Blom, Holger-Madsen (who was also the director of During the Plague) and Robert Dinesen. While at Fox, she appeared in four films directed by Edwards (one of their top directors at the time); the best known of these was the 1915 production of Anna Karenina.  The venture was not the success that she envisioned it being, and when movie stardom did not arrive she decided to return to Denmark. Her last American film was The Song of Hate (September 1915).  Upon her return, she only made two more films during her long acting career; both were directed by Blom.  In 1916, she had a small supporting role in in his domestic drama Sønnen.  Her last film was En ensom Kvide, released in May of 1917; in it Blom cast her in the female lead.  After this, she comfortably settled back into theater work; taking over management at a theater that would eventually be renamed for her: now the Betty Nansen Teatret. She managed the theater for over a quarter of a century and was still in management at the time of her death on the 15th of March in 1943.  She was only four days away from turning 70.  Interestingly, there are a number of public burial records of actors who worked at her theater, but none for her presently.

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