Berr of the Comédie Française

Berr of the Comédie Française. Paul Boyer, Paris (photographer). Maurice Manès, Paris (publisher). Before 1907.

Georges Berr (1867–1942) was a popular theatre and film actor. His father, who produced gloves, moved from Lorraine to Paris in the second half of the 1850s. Berr was a member of the Comédie Française from 1886 until his death. In addition, he was the author of numerous (fairly lightweight) comedies, many of which he wrote in cooperation with Louis Verneuil. Jointly with Marcel Guillemaud, he also produced a number of film scripts, notably for René Clair. As a playwright, Berr repeatedly used the pseudonym Colias, an anagram of his mother’s maiden name Ascoli. In his German-language dictionary of Jewish national biography, Salomon Wininger (1877–1968) speculated that she was “probably related to Chief Rabbi Ascoli” (presumably, he meant Isacco Ascoli, the former chief rabbi of Ferrara, 1808–1875). There is, however, nothing to suggest that this was the case. It is not entirely clear whether Berr’s maternal grandfather, Elias Vitta Ascoli (1806–1876), who worked for the champagne producer Perrier Jouët, was born in Lisbon or Gibraltar, but his parents were British.

Berr’s elder brother, Émile Berr (1855–1923), was a prominent journalist and staunch Dreyfusard who, for many years, worked for France’s foremost bourgeois daily, Le Figaro. Georges and Émile Berr’s second cousin, Abraham Georges Ascoli (1882–1944), a professor of literature at the Sorbonne who was removed from his post following the German invasion, and his wife Marianne Ascoli, née Grief (1891–1944), who was born in Constantine (Algeria), were deported, on 7 March 1944, with transport no. 69 from Drancy to Auschwitz where they were murdered.