Menu Home

The actor’s ring

By on • ( Leave a comment )

Since the 19th century, the “most significant and worthy” actor in the German-speaking theatre world carries the Iffland-Ring.

The Iffland-Ring is a solid iron ring containing a likeness of its namesake (actor August Wilhelm Iffland) surrounded by 28 diamonds. It is passed from actor to actor by will: when one actor dies, his successor receives the ring.

August Iffland

Friedrich Weise (* 1775) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Tradition holds that it was originally commissioned by Iffland himself, but the fifth bearer (Friedrich Haase) may have made the ring and invented the story instead. In either case, the most recent owner – Bruno Ganz – died on Feb 16th, and we have yet to discover his choice for the next bearer of the ring.

Categories: Arts & recreation Europe History Modern history Screen & stage

The Generalist

I live in Auckland, New Zealand, and am curious about most things.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: