Dietlinde Turban Maazel’s first stage appearance at the age of 19 as Gretchen in Goethe’s Faust in the Residenz-Theatre in Munich brought her national fame. In rapid succession she starred in new productions such as Shakespeare’s Othello (as Desdemona), for which she received the Bad Hersfeld Festival’s prize for best actress. Thanks to scores of films and plays filmed for television, Ms Turban won the coveted BAMBI Award by popular vote as Best Actress of the Year (1983). Her film credits include the part of Euridice in Ponnelle’s adaptation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a starring role in the American thriller Bloodline, and the World War II movie Mussolini and I, in which she acted opposite Anthony Hopkins.
Ms. Turban appeared as soloist/narrator with the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra and the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. She has toured with literature and poetry readings and recorded several audio books (Naxos).
In 2004 Ms. Turban premiered her first One Woman Play Constantly Risking Absurdity at the Cherry Lane Theatre, New York, with later performances at George Mason University, VA, and the American Austrian Foundation in Salzburg. In the summer 2013 she performed Jean Cocteau’s La Voix Humaine at the Castleton Festival where she also directed Wilder’s Our Town in 2015. Ms. Turban studied violin, classical dance and voice in Munich, New York and Aspen. Her theatre studies include Master Classes with Peter Brook and Lee Strasberg and the T. Schreiber Studio.
In 1996 she founded a private school for low-income families on her estate in Castleton, VA and developed a pilot educational project designed to explore new ways of integrating vital artistic and aesthetic values into school curricula. In 2009 she founded the Castleton Festival, together with her late husband Lorin Maazel which she has taken over as Artistic Director & CEO. She is on faculty at Rutgers University where she created a new course “Acting for Singers” for the Mason Gross School of the Arts.
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