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From nanny to “Queen of Music Editors”

The woman who was responsible for the music in many film classics died shortly before her 100th birthday. How Wrzburg’s Jdin Else Siegel made his career in Hollywood.

“She thinks like an artist and has the soul of a saint” With these words, actor and director Robert Redford honored Else Blangsted in 2006 when she worked on successful Hollywood films such as “Tootsie” and “The Fabulous Baker Boys” was awarded. Now the name of the native of Wrzburg went through the American media again: Else Blangsted’s death – shortly before her 100th birthday – received great attention in the press and film world.

No wonder. Ultimately, Else Blansted, as “music editor”, ensured that the melodies of film composers such as Quincy Jones, Michel Legrand or Dave Grusin can be heard in the right place in well-known Hollywood productions. As early as 1988, a 40-page article in the weekly magazine “The New Yorker” had spread the life story of Wrzburger, who was born in 1920 as Else Siegel. A life story that led from the Main to Los Angeles and was full of ups and downs.

The mother banker picks, the father horse dealer

Else Siegel’s father Siegmund came from Arnstein and settled in Wrzburg in 1914. After his assignment in the First World War, in which he was awarded the Iron Cross, Siegel worked in the horse treatment of the Am Exerzierplatz family, which he took over in 1928. In 1919 he married the banker daughter Lilly Oppenheimer in Aub, on May 22, 1920 the daughter Else was born, three years later her sister Margot.

Else attended the Wrzburg Jewish elementary school in Domerschulstrae and the Sophia school in Friedenstrae. She was a member of the Jewish Youth Association and the Jewish Culture Association. Because of disagreements in the family, about which she reported in detail to the “New Yorker” decades later, she retired to reading under the covers or in her father’s chairs. In the summer of 1936, the 16-year-old visited relatives in Berlin and witnessed how black American Jesse Owens won one of his four gold medals at the Olympic Games in front of Adolf Hitler.

Became pregnant at 16

When she returned to Wrzburg it turned out that she was pregnant. The 16-year-old hid it from her parents and continued her school education – as previously planned – in a boarding school in Switzerland. There, too, she didn’t reveal anything about her pregnancy. After a failed attempt to commit suicide, she lay down in the snow and hoped to freeze to death. In March 1937, Else Siegel gave birth to a daughter in a Swiss clinic.

What happened afterwards and why was never clearly clarified. In any case, the clinic’s sisters told the young mother that her child had died at birth. It should take several decades for the lie to come to light. The girl had been adopted by a Swiss family and was only to learn as an adolescent that she was not the birth child of her parents.

Else Siegel, who did not reveal the name of the father of a 24-year-old from Wrzburg, returned to Germany after giving birth, tormented by the idea that she had caused the child’s death by attempting suicide.

The photo of the uncle went through the world

For a few months she lived in Munich with a brother of her father, the lawyer Michael Siegel. He, who was also born in Arnstein and grew up in Schweinfurt, was known worldwide in a press photo in March 1933. The picture showed Michael Siegel walking barefoot and with cut trousers by SS men through Munich – around his neck a poster with the inscription “I will never complain to the police again”. The lawyer had previously protested anti-Semitic riots on a guard. He was taken to the police cellar and beaten so brutally that some teeth fell out and the eardrum burst.

A photo that went around the world: On March 10, 1933, shortly after the National Socialist takeover, Else Siegel’s Munich uncle Michael Siegel was brutally beaten and driven barefoot through Munich by SS men. A poster with the words “I will never complain to the police again” was hung around his neck.
      Photo: Federal Archives

In Munich, Else Siegel worked in a Jewish home for small children whose parents had been arrested. “The babies were crying,” she told the “New Yorker” in 1988: “I stopped them and then they stopped crying.” The 17-year-old liked the job: “She probably helped me unconsciously to get over the death of my own child,” she said in retrospect.

Escape from the Nazis

In August 1937, Else Siegel emigrated to Los Angeles. Her parents and sister followed in January 1939 after the Wrzburg apartment belonging to the Am Exerzierplatz family was destroyed during the November pogrom. The uncle, Michael Siegel, emigrated to Peru in 1940. In the same year, Else married the father of her daughter, who she believed to be dead. Wrzburger initially emigrated to Argentina. The couple had a second child, another daughter.

Working as a nanny for a relative of the film producer Harry Warner brought Else Siegel into contact with the Hollywood dream factory. Smaller jobs followed, including a brief appearance in Cecil B. DeMille’s monumental work “Samson and Delilah” in 1949. Her breakthrough came in 1960 when she became “music editor” for production companies such as Paramount and Columbia.

Music editor for Spielberg and Redford

Over the next few decades, she worked with directors such as Steven Spielberg (“The Color Purple”, 1985) and Sidney Pollack (“The Electric Rider”, 1979). Robert Redford hired the native of Wrzburg to direct “A Very Normal Family” (1980) and “Milagro The War in the Bean Field” (1988). Among her friends were Else Siegel Gregory Peck and Nastassja Kinski: The relationship with the actress was so close that she became the godmother of one of her daughters.

After divorcing her first husband, Else Siegel married the Danish-born cutter Folmar Blangsted in 1960. Two years after his death, the riddle about the daughter born in Switzerland in 1937 finally solved in 1984. In the meantime she had married and was called Lily Kopitopoulos. In 1984 she placed an advertisement in the American-Jewish emigrant newspaper “Aufbau”, with which she looked for her mother, whose name and former place of residence she had finally determined.

The daughter had survived!

The news that her first daughter, who she believed to be dead, was alive and wanted to meet her, was a great relief to Else Siegel. Just as Lily was happy to learn that she had been adopted without the mother’s knowledge and permission. As a result, there were numerous meetings in Los Angeles and Lausanne, where Lily lived and Else also temporarily moved into a house.

When Else Blangsted died on May 1st, at the age of 99, she was back in Los Angeles. There, she said, she always felt most at home.

Tip: A 52-minute film “A la Recherche dElse” Else Blangsted, shot in English and French by her grandson Sandy Kopitopoulos, is available on YouTube in its entirety. Her youth in Wrzburg is also treated here.

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