German actress whose greatest success was in the film Yvette (1938) under the direction of her husband Wolfgang Liebeneiner.
She was the illegitimate daughter of director Fritz Holl and actress and theater teacher Margit Hellberg (Margarethe Gribbohm). After attending drama school she made her debut in 1923 at the Landestheater Meiningen. Then she went to the theater company Holtorf as a stage actress, where she first appeared as a viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In the same year she became a member of the cooperative of German stage workers (GDBA). Theater engagements followed, among others, with Erich Ziegel at the Hamburger Kammerspiele (where she met her colleague Gustaf Gründgens), with Otto Falckenberg at the Münchner Kammerspiele, Königsberg, Leipzig, Vienna, and from 1938 to 1945 under the direction of Gustaf Gründgens at the Berlin State Theater.
From a liaison with the actor Oskar Homolka she had a daughter Christine, who died at an early age, and from her relationship with Fritz Landshoff she had a son Andreas. Her only marriage in 1934 to Liebeneiner ended in divorced in 1944.
In 1933, Ruth Hellberg made her debut as a film actress in Was wissen denn Männer. She appeared alongside Zarah Leander (Heimat, 1938), Heinrich George (Der Postmeister, 1940) and Paul Hartmann (Bismarck, 1940).
After the Second World War, Ruth Hellberg worked primarily as a theater actress in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bochum and Munich. Her last movie role was in 1991 alongside Karin Baal in Im Kreis der Lieben.
In addition, she worked since the mid-1930s extensively as a dubber over the voices of Vivien Leigh, Myrna Loy, Helen Hayes and Jeanne Moreau.
Ruth Hellberg died on 26 April 2001 in Feldafing, aged 94.
Link to Wikipedia biography