Obituary
Astri Merete Hudtwalcker (1916–1991)
Astri Merete Hudtwalcker has died at the age of 74. It was never in her nature to talk much about her childhood and youth. She was born in Copenhagen, yet it is impossible to understand the person she became without knowing something of those formative years.
She spent her earliest years living alone with her father, Poul Damkier, a theatre and literary critic in Copenhagen. After some years she moved to Oslo to live with her mother Astrid and her stepfather Harald Schwenzen. Harald Schwenzen was an actor at the National Theatre. She never experienced what most would call an ordinary family life. Her childhood appears to have been shaped by a rich, unconventional world, full of drama and constant change. Perhaps it was through both the joys and the hardships of those years that she developed many of the qualities that later defined her.
In her early twenties she met Carl H. Hudtwalcker (1912 – 1991). They shared an exceptionally close partnership for more than fifty years, until his death on 23 June this year (1991). Owing to the uncertainties and dangers of the Second World War, they did not marry until seven years after they first met. They had one son, John Michael.
Their family life was remarkably harmonious. With great devotion and an instinctiveartistic sense, Merete – as she prefered to be named – created a home of warmth, beauty and generosity. She maintained close friendships from childhood and youth throughout her life, while also forming lasting friendships with younger people and cultivating many contacts abroad.
Before long, Oslo proved too small for someone of her breadth of mind and spirit. Warm-hearted, vibrant and full of colour, she felt as much at home among relatives in Peru and in the modern art salons of Central Europe as she did in the fishmonger’s or the cafés of Majorstuen.
She took a lively interest in everything that shaped the world around her and possessed an unusually intuitive understanding of people, art and society. She delighted those around her with unexpected observations and sparkling humour. Few people were better able to separate what truly mattered from what did not, sometimes with merciless honesty, yet always in a way that was ultimately liberating. She was refreshingly free from convention, pretension and empty rhetoric.
Even as her health gradually declined – particularly after the loss of her husband – she retained her vitality of spirit, her warmth and her gift for making others feel close to her.
Something of all this will continue to live on in those who had the privilege of knowing her.
Arne Enge
Aftenposten, 28 August 1991
Note
Harald Stammann Fries Schwenzen (1895–1954), the brother of screenwriter Per Schwenzen and actor Hjalmar Fries, was a Norwegian actor and film director. As chairman of the Norwegian Actors’ Association, he was arrested several times during the German occupation. He was eventually deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was imprisoned from 1944 until the end of the war in 1945.
As an actor, Schwenzen appeared at Oslo’s National Theatre and became known for roles including Don Carlos in Friedrich Schiller’s play of the same name and the title role in Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. He made his screen debut in 1920 in Victor Sjöström’s film adaptation of Hjalmar Bergman’s Mästerman.
In 1922 he wrote the screenplay for and directed Knut Hamsun’s Pan, a silent film now regarded as a classic of Scandinavian cinema and still shown at film festivals, cinematheques and retrospectives in Norway and abroad. Between 1925 and 1944 he appeared in several other Norwegian films. In 1948 he portrayed the German Colonel General Nicolaus von Falkenhorst in the movie Kampen om tungtvannet (Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water). In 1951, he received the King’s Medal of Merit in Gold in recognition of his contributions to Norwegian cultural life.
Original text in Norwegian published in 2024.
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