Margherita "Rita" Sacchetto (15 January 1880 – 18 January 1959) was a German dancer, film actress, and screenwriter.
Early life Margherita Sacchetto was born in Munich, in what was then the German Empire, on 15 January 1880. Her father was from Venice, and her mother was Austrian. She trained as a dancer in Munich.Emily M. Burbank, "Rita Sacchetto" Putnam's Magazine (November 1909): 186–191.Caroline Caffin, Dancing and Dancers of Today (Dodd, Mead & Company 1912): 214–228.
Career
Sacchetto made her debut in 1905 at the Munich Künstlerhaus. Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser designed the sets for her performance in 1906.Edward Ross Dickinson, Dancing in the Blood: Modern Dance and European Culture on the Eve of the First World War (Cambridge University Press 2017): 77. She toured internationally from 1908 to 1910 with dancer Loie Fuller,Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press 2009): 126. including a show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910,"Loie Fuller Shows her Dancing Girls" New York Times (December 1, 1909): 7. and a dance about women's suffrage set to the music of Edvard Grieg, performed at the New Theatre, also in 1910."Incarnating Woman Suffrage in a Dance" New York Times (May 22, 1910): SM8. She also ran a dance school in Berlin from 1916 to 1918,Karl Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (University of California Press 1997): 235–237. with students including Rahel Sanzara, Anita Berber, Hansi Burg, and Valeska Gert.Valeska Gert, Je suis une sorcière: kaléidoscope d'une vie dansée (Editions Complexe 2004): 259. Among her neighbors in Berlin was the scientist, Max Born, who recalled her as "a very beautiful woman" with "dazzling" students.Max Born, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate (Routledge 2014).
She was known for developing a style called tanzbilder, which involved novel dance interpretations of great works of art, with remarkable costumes designed by Sacchetto herself.Mary Simonson, "Dancing Pictures: Rita Sacchetto’s Tanzbilder" in Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Oxford Scholarship Online 2014). "Spanish Dancing" New York Times (May 1, 1910): XX3. Caroline V. Kerr of Theatre magazine described Sacchetto in 1909 as "wholly human, of fascinating naiveté, captivating in her exuberance of temperament, in her grace and charm.""Rita Sacchetto: Munich's Famous Dancer" The Theatre (December 1909): 172–173. Ben Ali Haggin painted Sacchetto's portrait in one of her best-known costumes, titled "En Crinoline".Gardner Teall, "Ben Ali Haggin, Painter of Portraits" Hearst's (November 1916): 308. At the peak of her dance career, she was a frequent guest of European royalty, including Queen Margherita of Savoy, Nicholas II of Russia's family, and Alfonso XIII of Spain."Coryphee Given Royalty Praise at Many Courts" Inter Ocean (17 November 1912): 13. via Newspapers.com
She appeared in several Danish and German silent films,"Rita Sacchetto To Appear in Films" Evening Sun (29 September 1913): 7. via Newspapers.com under contract to Nordisk Film,Isak Thorsen, Nordisk Films Kompagni 1906–1924, Volume 5: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Bear (Indiana University Press 2017): 123. between 1913 and 1917.Mary Simonson, "Dance Pictures: The Cinematic Experiments of Anna Pavlova and Rita Sacchetto" Screening the Past (August 2015). In the United States, she was known for her appearance in The Ghost of the White Lady (1914),"A Feature that Charms" Moving Picture World (January 17, 1914): 276. and In the Line of Duty (1914)."Noted Italian Actress in Military Drama" Dayton Herald (April 25, 1914): 9. via Newspapers.com She wrote one film, En Død i Skønhed (1915), in which she also appeared.
Later years At age 37, Rita Sacchetto married in Vienna the 24-year-old Polish nobleman and sculptor August Zamoyski on 5 May 1917Piotr Szubert, "August Zamoyski" Culture.pl. Afterwards she moved with her husband to Zakopane, where in June 1920 she opened a school of dance and pantomime. In 1922, she went on tour of Europe performing dance and pantomime compositions described by critics as expressionistic and formistic. In 1924, Sacchetto was accidentally shot in the foot by one of her husband's friends, which stopped her public performances In 1930 the couple moved to Italy, where in 1930s she worked occasionally in Italian film productions. Sacchetto died in 1959, in Nervi, Italy, three days after her 79th birthday.
References
External links
Rita Sacchetto's listing on BFI