Amélie Diéterle


Amélie Diéterle was a French actress and opera singer. She was one of the popular actresses of the Belle Époque until the beginning of the Années Folles. Amélie Diéterle inspired the poets Léon Dierx and Stéphane Mallarmé and the painters Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alfred Philippe Roll.

Biography

Amélie Diéterle was born in Strasbourg on 20 February 1871. She was the daughter of a maidservant from Munich and a young French officer, Captain Louis Laurent who was garrisoned nearby in 1870.
Having won first prize of song and solfège at the Conservatory of Dijon, she went to Paris in 1889 where she was chosen from 40 competitors to enter the Concerts Colonne. She was a pupil of Alice Ducasse who had been a singer of the Opéra-Comique. She was spotted in 1891 by the conductor of the Théâtre des Variétés and presented to the director Eugène Bertrand who hired her. This began a career of nearly 35 years in the troupe of the Variety Theatre. She became a permanent actress who had her own rooms and reserved box.
Her little voice flutée and her nose " trumpet " make her very popular and very appreciated.
She became the protégé of art collector Paul Gallimard, who was also the owner of the Variety Theater. She also inspired poets Léon Dierx and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Auguste Renoir made three portraits of her, a lithograph in gray on wove paper in 1899, exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago Museum and a pastel in 1903, exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston.
The two paintings depict Amélie Diéterle wearing a white hat. The third portrait, made around 1910, is a pastel, currently at the in Saint-Quentin.
One of the three works was loaned in 1922 by Gaston Bernheim to the exhibition A Hundred Years of French Painting from Ingres to Cubism, organized for the benefit of the Strasbourg Museum at the Parisian headquarters of the Antiquarian Room.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec makes it appear in one of his most famous paintings dated 1896: Marcelle Lender dancing bolero in Chilperic''.
Alfred Philippe Roll made a painting of her in June 1913, showing her half-naked sitting in a garden chair with. This painting is donated by Mrs. Henriette Roll at the Museum of Fine Arts of the City of Paris, at the Petit Palais.
It has achieved great notoriety as is still reflected today the many postcards of the 1900s that represent it.
She lived for a long time in the city of Croissy-sur-Seine.
Compromise in spite of herself in the affair of the traffic of the fake Rodin statues in 1919 and tired by thirty years in the spotlight, she withdraws progressively from the scene between 1920 and 1923.
On 16 June 1930, she married a friend of the family, André Louis Simon, in Vallauris.
Amélie Diéterle took refuge in Vallauris after June 1940 and died in Cannes after a long illness on 20 January 1941, at the age of 70 years.

Distinctions

Amélie Diéterle Appointed Officer of Public Instruction 20 January 1908.

Gallery

Theater