Marguerite Viby

Marguerite Viby (25 June 1909 – 8 April 2001) was a Danish actress of stage, film and television. Considered one of the great comedy actresses of Danish cinema, Viby received honorary Bodil and Robert Awards in 2000 for lifetime achievement. She appeared in more than 50 films and television shows during a career that spanned from the silent film era in 1929 until a television series in 1983. Career Marguerite Viby was born Ida Marguerite Steenberg Jensen Viby in Copenhagen, Denmark on 25 June 1909, the daughter of a policeman and a secretary. Her father died when she was 16 and her mother a year later. Viby left school at 14, and worked part-time to pay for dance lessons. She was schooled as a dancer at Emilie Walbom's Ballet School as'a well as through private instruction from the Danish Royal Dancer John Andersen. In 1923, when she was 14 years old, Viby debuted in a summer revue at Tivoli Gardens. She continued to perform in revues and stage musicals throughout her life. In 1929, Viby began her film career in the silent film Højt på en kvist (High on in the Attic). She followed with four Fy og Bi comedies film in which her casting was mostly based on her physical attraction, however in He, She and Hamlet, the first Danish combined sound film, she danced and sang a romantic duet with leading man Hans W. Petersen. According to Danish film historian Morten Piil, it was Viby's next role which established her most noted persona—the energetic, witty woman who acts as she necessary to maneuver in a man's world. In the 1932 George Schnéevoigt film Tretten År (13 Years), Viby was an office girl who plays a thirteen-year-old Lolita to avoid men's advances. Piil wrote that it was only Viby's "fundamental cheerful innocence which saved this erotic farce..."