Herbert Berghof

Herbert Berghof was an Austrian-American theatre performer, director and writer.

Berghof was born in Vienna, the son of Regina and Paul Berghof, who was a railroad stationmaster. He graduated from the University of Vienna and the Vienna State Academy of Dramatic Art. A student of Max Reinhardt, Berghof acted with the St. Gallen Repertory Theater in Switzerland and the Volkstheater in Vienna. When the Nazis began their reign in Austria, Berghof fled Vienna, arriving in New York City in 1939. There, he joined Erwin Piscator at The New School for Social Research. His Broadway debut was in From Vienna, one of the shows created and performed by and for Austrian refugees in exile.

Berghof performed on Broadway in many productions, including: The Man Who Had All the Luck by Arthur Miller, Oklahoma!, Miss Liberty, Hedda Gabler with Eva Le Gallienne, The Deep Blue Sea, The Andersonville Trial, directed by José Ferrer and also featuring George C. Scott, and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. His directing credits include Poor Murderer by Pavel Kohout and the first Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, with Bert Lahr, E.G. Marshall, Alvin Epstein, and Kurt Kasznar. As a screen actor, Berghof made rare film appearances, as in the science-fiction 1952 movie Red Planet Mars, and decades later gave a short, but poignant performance in the Paul Mazursky film Harry and Tonto (1974), as Art Carney's parkbench pal 'Jacob Rivetowski'.

Accustomed to the theater system in Europe where actors are continually employed, Berghof was upset upon finding that American artists could go many months without employment or regular practice. This was his reason for creating HB Studio in 1945, later joined by his future wife Uta Hagen. In 1963, with money he earned during the filming of the movie Cleopatra, Berghof purchased the adjacent space at 124 Bank Street to use as a theatre and established the HB Playwrights Foundation.