German postcard. NPG, no. 1064. Photo Angelo, Budapest 1918.
Giza Mészáros (1879-1953) was a popular Hungarian stage actress, who also acted in some six silent Hungarian films of the 1910s.
After school and drama school, Mészáros debuted on stage in 1896, and had her first roles at the National Theater in 1900. In 1897 her daughter Paulette was born. In 1907 she joined the Hungarian Theater, soon after the Folk Theater - Vígoper, and in 1910 Vígszínház, where she left in 1916. Her partner in those years was actor Gyula Csortos. In the 1910s, Giza Mészáros was often the first to appear in the latest Parisian dresses and was regarded as the uncrowned queen of tight shoes and silk stockings, pursuing a star-like lifestyle. From 1918 she played at the Downtown Theater, in 1921 she signed up for the Renaissance Theater in Vienna. From 1924, she was a member of the Union of Theaters, and from 1925 she was a member of the Downtown and Renaissance Theater. In Vienna, at the Renaissance Theater for a long time, she was a notable guest performer. Until 1932 she acted at the various theaters in Budapest.
Giza Mészáros had a modest film career in the 1910s, starting with Egy csók története (Sándor Góth, 1912), which starred her partner Gyula Csortos. Afterward followed A Marhakereskedö (Sándor Góth, 1913), Lotti ezredesei (Colonel Lotti, Peter Paul Felner, 1916) in which she had the lead, A föld embere (Earth's Man, Michael Curtiz, 1917), starring Oscar Beregi as a mine engineer, and finally A hazugság (The Lie, Ödön Uher ifj., 1919), after Paul Bourget's novel Mensonges, about a woman with a double life as world-wise, frivolous lover of an older baron, and at the same time the chaste and remorseful lover of a young poet.
In the autumn of 1953, Giza Mészáros' son-in-law, the Spanish businessman Ricardo Jossua, was already in an emotionally unstable state, often with thoughts of death. From the beginning of October, he stayed with his wife Paulette and mother-in-law Giza at the luxury hotel Kléber, Avenue 17, in Paris. On November 18, while Paulette and Giza slept, Jossua fired the two women with his gun, and then shot himself in the bathroom. According to the letters found by the police, Jossua had already tried to drive his car into the Seine with the aim of eliminating all three of them, but he was afraid to be found and saved in time. (NB IMDB lists Giza Mészáros's death as 1954 but that is wrong).
Giza Mészáros was an educated, intelligent actress, who portrayed dramatic heroines with just the same tools and features as her comic figures of the operettas, but found it difficult to adapt to the new acting style.
Sources: Hungarian Wikipedia, IMDB.
