Ellen Vogel is dead, aged 93, and that is a loss. Calling her 'a monument' is an insult, so I won't do that here. Ellen Vogel was a regal actress, though: dignified and a bit posh. She was also someone who knew how to hide her anger sublimely.
I experienced Ms Vogel a couple of times. The first time in 1991, when she played a small but essential role in Thomas Bernhard's play Heldenplatz. I was assistant to director Leonard Frank, who came back gloriously from a few bad years with this play. For Ms Vogel, it marked a return within serious, subsidised theatre.
Thomas Bernhard with Ellen Vogel, Anne-Wil Blankers and André van den Heuvel, and also at Het Nationale Toneel which was then still the Haagsche Comedie with a new name. For me, as a wild theatre science revolutionary, that meant a kind of collusion with the enemy. A stay in the Jurassic Park of the patriotic theatre, preferably still spelt with two Os, in the middle of the dinosaurs.
That's how I thought about it beforehand. After only two rehearsals, I had totally changed my mind. Precisely those so-called dinosaurs turned out to have to fight their status every day, while I was blown off my chair by their charisma. Ellen Vogel in the lead. She had only a small attendance, at the very end of the three-and-a-half-hour word work, but was present at almost all rehearsals and all performances of the long tour from the beginning. And when she entered, something happened to the rest of the audience. A shudder. Charisma or charisma, whatever you want to call it, but it is what separates the greats from the scribblers. It may have been a trick, of course: even Joop Admiraal, an actor of unparalleled charisma, managed to make sure with a small act at every turnout that the attention went to him, very briefly, but, just enough not to disturb the others.
In the back of the taxi back from yet another performance came the stories and anecdotes. What particularly stuck with me from these was the great loneliness Ellen Vogel talked about. What started as an observation familiar to actors, that the stars of the evening always enter and leave the theatre after a meal at the Chinese restaurant opposite the theatre through an obscure back door (the stage entrance), developed into a story about all those people in all those halls who want to take you as an actor into their hearts, talk to you, cry with you, and that you never have the time or energy to do this, especially on mega-tours like these. Let alone seeing even one spectator, through the bright lights. And so you keep stepping in that puddle with your bunch of flowers at the artist's exit, waiting for that taxi. It was the time when, as a stage actor, you weren't supposed to do TV either.
All very romantic, of course, but the life of a stage actor in the unique Dutch theatre system is not very pleasant: every night somewhere else, with no connection to any place, never the same colleagues for more than four months and, on top of that, always rehearsing during the day on one play, while in the evening you are in Heerlen with another. Or Meppel. Ellen Vogel managed to keep her sanity partly by being married, after previous artist marriages, not to an actor but to a businessman. This enabled her to put the profession into perspective.
In 2000, I had the chance to interview Ellen Vogel, along with Sigrid Koetse and Henni Orri, two other grande dames of the stage. It was a joyous lunch. You can find the whole interview at my website. A single quote from Vogel, who is now called 'Grande Dame' everywhere: "I am not a lady at all. I would gladly play a vulgar slut, or a drunkard. Just not a simple working-class woman. Not that one."
She has had a tough time in her long career. And she has survived many of the haters. Let that be a consolation, because how she described it, in 2000, is still often daily reality for many people: ''I suddenly belonged to the old-fashioned bite, they didn't want me anymore. Then you sit. And I wanted to play. And then you call up companies and ask them if they have anything. They would look, you hear, but you also heard, secretly, that you were laughed at. Those are sensitive moments. That people say: don't expect me to shoot for you, or anything like that."
The entire interview from 2000: http://www.wijbrandschaap.nl/2000/11/ellen-vogel-hennie-orri-en-sigrid-koetse/
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