Lilia Skala was an Austrian-American architect and actress. She is perhaps best known for her role in the film Lilies of the Field, for which she received critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination. During her career, Skala was also nominated for two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. Before Skala decided to be an actress, she practiced architecture as a profession. She is one of the first women architects in Austria. Skala is the first woman member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. She graduated from University of DresdenSumma cum Laude; the institution is now known as the Technical University of Dresden, located in Germany. Her legendary life was the subject of an eponymous one-woman play, Lilia! The play is written and performed by her granddaughter, Libby Skala.
Early life and education
Skala was born Lilia Sofer in Vienna. Her mother, Katharina Skala, was Catholic, and her father, Julius Sofer, was Jewish and worked as a manufacturer's representative for the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company. She was one of the first women to graduate in architecture and engineering from the University of Dresden, before practicing architecture professionally in Vienna. In the late 1930s, she was forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her husband, Louis Erich Skala, and their two young sons. Skala and her husband managed to escape from Austria and eventually settled in the United States.
Career
According to Skala's son, Peter Skala's short memoir, he believes Skala developed interests in theatre when she was 14 or 15 years old. However, Skala's parents were conservative and preferred Skala to pursue a career that's more "respectable". At that time, women were not allow to study at The University of Vienna, so Skala's parents has to send her to the TU Dresden in Germany. Although there is no sufficient information about why Skala choose Architecture as her specific area of study, we do know that she excelled in a field that is traditionally dominated by male and graduated with a Summa cum Laude. Skala returned to Vienna and continued to practice architecture after the completion of her undergraduate degree. Skala has never stoped looking for beauty, whether it is architecture, or performance arts. About a year after the birth of her son, Peter Skala, she started acting lessons and rediscover her long-lost passion in theater. As her creative talents unfold, Skala started to appear on countless television shows and serials from 1952 to 1985, and as Grand Duchess Sophie kept company on Broadway with Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam not too many years after toiling in a Queens zipper factory as a non-English-speaking refugee from Austria. She played Lisa Douglas’s mother, the Countess, on Green Acres in the 1960s. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress for her most famous role as the Mother Superior in 1963's Lilies of the Field opposite Oscar-winning Sidney Poitier. Skala also appeared in Ship of Fools, Charly, Deadly Hero, Eleanor and Franklin, Roseland, HeartlandFlashdance, and House of Games.
Death and legacy
Skala died in 1994 in Bay Shore, New York, of natural causes at age 98. A collection of architectural drawings that she had made as an architecture student at the University of Dresden from 1915 to 1920 was donated to the International Archives of Women in Architecture by her sons, Peter, and Martin Skala. The collection is part of Skala's belongings when she fled the Nazis in 1939.
