German theatre and film actress and soprano operetta singer active in Germany between 1919 and 1933 and on British radio between 1935 and 1955.
After the Great War she was frequently cast in Weimar silent films by the pioneering cinema directors F. W. Murnau and E. A. Dupont and in whose films she worked with noted actors Bela Lugosi and Conrad Veidt. Her best known and penultimate film was Phil Jutzi’s morality play Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1931). In all, she appeared in 35 silent films and three sound films of differing styles during the Weimar era.
In 1924 Margarete Schlegel married the assimilated Jewish-Prussian political economist, Prof Hermann Joachim Levy. In 1926 they had a son, Hermann Martin Heinrich Levy, who was baptised Catholic. In 1935 she fled Nazi germany with her son to join her husband in Britain.
After arriving in England, she became a featured soprano on BBC Radio in operas and operettas by Offenbach, Lehar and Horton in the late 1930s. During WW2 she broadcast anti-Nazi German-language propaganda radio programs for BBC Europe which were heard across the Continent. After her husband died suddenly in 1949 from a heart attack, she remarried and moved to Saltdean on the Sussex coast in England. She died on 15 July 1987, aged 87.
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