About Leontine Sagan
Leontine Sagan was a theatre director and actress of Jewish descent, whose life and career took her from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to South Africa, Britain and the United States. She is best known for directing a film, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), which has been celebrated for its scathing indictment of Prussian military-style schooling, as well as its sensitive portrayal of same-sex intimacy between a teacher and a student at a girls' school, in the waning years of Germany's Weimar Republic. Although best known for her film Mädchen in Uniform, Sagan came to film directing indirectly. She co-founded the National Theatre Organisation of South Africa in 1947, and died in Pretoria, South Africa in 1974, at the age of 85. After returning to Vienna to study with the famous director Max Reinhardt, Leontine adopted the stage name Sagan and acted on stage first in Austrian provincial theatres and then in the 1910s and 1920s in Vienna, Frankfurt and Berlin. In February 1948 she directed the NTO's first English production Dear Brutus by J.M.
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