Judith Malina Movies and Career Information

Judith Malina (born June 4, 1926) is an American theater and film actor, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre. Malina was born in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of Jewish parents: her mother was a former actress and her father a rabbi. In 1929 at the age of two, she immigrated with her parents to New York City. Her parents helped her see how important political theatre was, as her father was trying to warn people of the Nazi menace. Except for long tours, she has lived in New York 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 in departing from traditional narrative forms. Piscator saw theatre as a form of political communication or agitprop—Malina, unlike Piscator, was committed to nonviolence and anarchism. Malina met her long-time collaborator and husband, Julian Beck, in 1943, when she was 17 and he was a student at Yale University. Beck, originally a painter, came to share her interest in