25 Facts About Maurice Schwartz

Maurice Schwartz, born Avram Moishe Schwartz, born in the Volhynia province of the Russian Empire, was a stage and film actor active in the United States.

Maurice Schwartz founded the Yiddish Art Theatre and its associated school in 1918 in New York City and was its theatrical producer and director.

Maurice Schwartz worked in Hollywood, mostly as an actor in silent films but as a film director, producer, and screenwriter.

In 1898 Isaac Maurice Schwartz emigrated with his three teen-aged daughters, so they could all work to get started in New York and earn money for passage for Rose and their three young sons.

Maurice Schwartz's father located him in 1901, and they traveled together to New York when Moishe was twelve.

Maurice Schwartz's father enrolled him in the Baron de Hirsch school, founded to teach Jewish immigrants.

Maurice Schwartz, who admired the actors David Kessler and Jacob Adler, began reading widely, especially classic plays by such authors as William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen.

Maurice Schwartz joined various traveling theater troupes, including one that toured the Midwest.

Soon Maurice Schwartz obtained a contract with Michael Thomashevsky's Green Street Theatre in Philadelphia.

Maurice Schwartz was briefly married to Eva Rafalo, a contralto singer born in Cincinnati, Ohio, whom he met while touring with an acting company.

In 1914 Maurice Schwartz married Anna Bordofsky, a 24-year-old woman from Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, who had been in the United States about a decade.

Maurice Schwartz was initially involved with Kessler's Yiddish theater as well.

Maurice Schwartz became his business partner, helping run the theatre.

Maurice Schwartz met the boy Moses at the Wezembeek Orphanage in Belgium in 1946 while on a theatrical tour for displaced persons.

Maurice Schwartz arranged to adopt Moses and his sister through the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had located Fannie and brought the siblings together.

Maurice Schwartz started acting early, working for six years in companies and locations outside New York: the Midwest and Philadelphia.

In 1918, Maurice Schwartz founded the Yiddish Art Theatre, taking a lease on the Irving Place Theatre, in the Union Square neighborhood in New York City.

Maurice Schwartz had ambitions for a people's theater that would produce classic, literary works.

Maurice Schwartz took his company on a tour to Europe in 1924 and to South America in 1929.

Maurice Schwartz's most lauded featured roles were as "Reb Malech" in Israel Joshua Singer's Yoshe Kalb, "Luka" in Maxim Gorki's The Lower Depths, Oswald in Henrick Ibsen's Ghosts, Shylock in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, at the Palace Theatre, and the title role in King Lear.

Maurice Schwartz performed in English on Broadway and in other venues.

Maurice Schwartz later traveled to the new nation of Israel and performed on stage there.

Maurice Schwartz appeared in more than twenty films between 1910 and 1953; the majority were silents.

Maurice Schwartz died following a heart attack in Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel near Tel Aviv.

Maurice Schwartz is buried in the Yiddish-theatre section of the Mount Hebron Cemetery in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City.