Singers and Actors: Fritzi Massary (Madame Pompadour)

Max Pollak

Austrian soprano singer and actress Fritzi Massary was born Friederike Massaryk in Vienna on March 31, 1882. She would become a leading singer in the opera houses of Berlin and Vienna in the 1910s and performed for the soldiers of the Imperial Army of occupied Belgium during World War I. She worked with famed composer Oscar Straus in the early 1920s, and with Noel Coward in his musical Operette in 1938.

Of Jewish extraction, she left Germany on the eve of World War II, despite her family's conversion to the Protestant religion in 1903. Traveling to US by way of London, she settled in Los Angeles where she remained until her death on January 30, 1969.