Marguerite Julie Strauss


Marguerite Julie Strauss, also known as Rita Matthias, was an actress and translator. Strauss began her acting career performing on the stage in New York City, as well as across Europe. Her theatrical connections led to a career as a translator, focusing on the works of European playwrights, the crime novels of Edgar Wallace, and the writings of Thomas Mann and his son Klaus Mann.

Early life and education

Strauss was born in 1888 in New York City. Her parents were Gustavus E., and Sadie Strauss. Her father was a manufacturer of automotive parts for the pioneers of the automobile industry. Her sister, Adele, married Harry N. Allen, who in 1907, introduced the first fleet of gasoline powered taxicabs into the streets of New York City. Adele was a civic leader who helped found the Women's Auxiliary of The French Hospital in 1914.
Marguerite J. Strauss graduated from Barnard College in 1908.

Personal life

Strauss married three times. Her first marriage was to Dr. Lewis H. Marks in 1909. Marks was assistant to Paul Ehrlich at the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt-am-Main. Strauss's profile of Ehrlich was published in McClure's Magazine in 1910. In 1915, after the German war effort had taken over Marks' laboratory building for anti-aircraft purposes, the couple relocated to the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. They divorced.
Her next marriage was to Karl-Ernst Matthias, and she began using the stage/pen name Rita Matthias. They too, divorced.
Her third and final marriage was to L. Walther Reil. For a time she went by the hyphenated Rita Matthias-Reil, and finally Rita Reil.
Strauss was associated with the American artist Marsden Hartley and the Canadian writer Pierre Coalfleet, having met both in Berlin, in 1922. Pierre Coalfleet, nom de plume of Frank Cyril Shaw Davison, became a frequent collaborator of Strauss's. Over a 10 year period, they translated 58 plays, mostly from English into German. Forty-nine of them were produced.
In 1937, after Hitler's rise to power, Strauss returned to the United States.
The 1940 census finds her living with her husband and eight "lodgers" at 120 E. 34th Street in New York City.

Professional life

Strauss's acting credits include appearances with the Provincetown Players and The Experimental Theatre Inc. in New York City, in 1923-24. In addition she performed in Europe, including at the Lessing Theatre in Berlin.
She transitioned to the translation of European drama, with a focus on the work of German Expressionism, translating works by Walter Hasenclever, Georg Kaiser, and Ferdinand Bruckner, among others. She partnered with the young Willard R. Trask to form the eponymous theatrical publishing and licensing house Bühnen-Verlag Trask & Matthias, publishing acting editions of their own translations. Trask went on to a storied career as a translator, culminating in his being the first to receive the Gold Medal from The Translation Center at Columbia University.
In 1927, Strauss was approached by an associate of Max Reinhardt, who commissioned her to translate Edgar Wallace's The Ringer, which was a hit on the London sage at the time. She entitled the German translation Der Hexer. The production at the Deutsches Theatre proved a success, and this led to a long string of Wallace translations, the novels and adaptations for the stage.
Strauss's 1937 contract with The Oxford University Press to translate Martin Gumpert's Dunant. Der Roman des Roten Kreuzes, resulted in her becoming a minor figure in the second of the Alger Hiss Trials. Her engagement with OUP was severed in March of 1938, and the translator hired to replace her was Whittaker Chambers, a major player in the affair. The March 1938 time frame proved to be of particular significance at the perjury trial of Hiss.
In 1949, Rita Reil established her own literary agency in New York City specializing in foreign language books.
In 1953, she ran the International Press Alliance Corporation, in New York City. This was an American subsidiary of the Paris firm, :fr:Opera_Mundi|Opera Mundi, the press agency founded by Paul Winkler in 1928.

Late life

Rita Reil returned to Barnard College to tutor in French and German as a "labor of love" and was awarded Phi Beta Kappa "in recognition of her excellence."
She died in her sleep on June 25, 1961.

Theater works

Acting credits include:
Translations and adaptions:
Translations
The novels of Edgar Wallace including:
Essays