Leah Koenig is a stage and film actress, and the recipient of the Israel Prize for Theatre. Koenig who, not once has been dubbed ‘the first lady and grande dame of Israeli theatre’ was born in 1929, Poland, to a family of actors. During World War II and throughout the Holocaust, she and mother lived in the Romanian city of Chernivtsi. They later managed to escape to Uzbekistan and after the war, returned to Romania. Much to her mother’s dismay, Koenig decided to pursue acting and enroled at Bucharest’s National University of Arts, after which she started acting in the local Jewish theatre. In 1961, she and her husband, actor and director Zvi Stolper moved to Israel where Koening was quickly welcomed to Habima National Theatre’s actors company with which she has since become synonymous.
Highlights of her stage credits with Habima include Genesis (1962), Photo Finish (1963), Tango (1967), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1970), The Chairs (1970), Mother Courage and her Children (1975), A Winter Funeral (1978), Mirele Efros (1986), The Labour of Life (1989), Arsenic and Old Lace (1991), Three Tall Women (1997), A Visitor’s Guide to Warsaw (1999), The House of Bernarda Alba (2001), Butterflies are Free (2004), What are we Going to Do with Jenny (2015), and Mikveh (2019).
Highlights of her film credits include Lupo! (Menahem Golan, 1970), The Highway Queen (Menahem Golan, 1971), Katz and Carrasso (Menahem Golan, 1971), Two Heartbeats (Shmuel Imberman, 1972), Lupo Goes to New York (Boaz Davidson, 1976), Worlds Apart (Barbara Noble, 1979), Things (aka ‘devarim’) (Amos Gitai, 1995), Kadosh (Amos Gitai, 1999), Laugh Lines (Pini Eden, 2015), and Madam Yankelova’s Fine Literature Club (Guilhad Emilio Schenker, 2017).
Koenig has also appeared in a variety of Yiddish-speaking one-woman shows, and even co-starred alongside her husband in A Pair from Heaven, an original stage show he had written.
