Antonina Hoffmann

Antonina Hoffmann (16 June 1842 – 16 June 1897) was a Polish theatre actress and a leading representative of the so-called 'Kraków School' of acting introduced by . Her acting career spanned five decades during the Victorian era.

Early life Hoffmann was born in Trzebinia, Central Europe, the daughter of Jan Hoffmann and Emilia , an impoverished landowning evangelical family of German origin. In her youth she attended Paulina Kraków's finishing school for girls in Warsaw. Against the wishes of her family, she decided that she wanted to go on the stage; in 1858 she began taking private acting lessons from Jan Królikowski, in the same year becoming a student at Józef Rychter's School of Drama in Warsaw. She made her stage debut aged 17, while still a student, as Fredericka Wagner in Émile Augier and Jules Sandeau's comedy Touchstone at the Rozmaitości Theatre in 1859. In November that year her body was moved to its own grave, which is decorated with a sculpture-bust of the artist by Michał Korpal and an epitaph which states that she devoted 37 years to the Kraków stage.

Roles In total, she played nearly 400 theatre roles; among these were Elizabeth in Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos and Lady Milford in the same author's Love and Intrigue, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Catherine in Taming of the Shrew, Gertrude in Hamlet, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth and Desdemona in Othello. She also appeared in the title role in Jean Racine's tragedy Phèdre, played Suzanne in Pierre Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro and Camilla in Alfred de Musset's No Trifling with Love. She was responsible for introducing the dramas of Juliusz Słowacki to the Kraków stage. She played a number of roles from the Polish repertoire, including Clara in Aleksander Fredro's Śluby panieńskie (Maidens' Vows) and Gulda in Joseph Conrad's Cyganie (The Gypsies). She also appeared in contemporary French dramas, playing, among others, Joanna de Simerose in L'ami des Femmes and Severine in Princess George by Alexandre Dumas, Princess Falconieri in Octave Feuillet's Dalila and the title role in Victorien Sardou's Odette.