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Hilda Gleser

Estonian actress and theatre director (1893-1932)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ23942758 ↗
Source-derived summary

Hilda Gleser (8 July 1893 – 25 August 1932) was an Estonian actress, director and theatre teacher.

Biography

Hilda Gleser was born on 8 [O.S. 1893] July in the city of Viljandi in the family of a bricklayer, where she also received her primary and secondary education. From 1910 she took part in amateur performances. She did not receive a professional theater education, but took acting lessons from the Finnish actress Hilma Rantanen, and later improved her skills in Germany and Russia.

From 1916 until the end of her life, she was an actress at the Estonia theatre in Tallinn. From 1921 to 1924 she worked in parallel at the Morning Theatre, and from 1926 to 1932 at the Workers' Theatre. Among her best roles were: Puck (Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1919), Woman (Ernst Toller's The Man-Mass, 1922), Electra (Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Electra, 1923), Åse (Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, 1927), Mrs. Peachum (Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, 1930), Laura (Eduard Vilde's Musta mantliga mees, 1927), Tiina (August Kitzberg's Libahunt, 1928). She performed in the genre of artistic recitation (from 1929 on the radio). As the Theater Encyclopedia notes, "the images created by Gleser are marked by vivid character, sincerity, heroic direction, and are distinguished by a sharp, distinctive design and extreme expressiveness".

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Hilda Gleser” as estonian actress and theatre director (1893-1932). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hilda, Gleser and Estonian.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1893, 1932, 1910, 1916—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1893-07-08. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Hilda, Gleser and Estonian providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Hilda Gleser”, the useful work is to connect “estonian actress and theatre director (1893-1932)” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23942758. VIAF identifies the subject as 266146634409341931880. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1893, 1932, 1910 and 1916.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hilda Gleser”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hilda Gleser primary sources, Hilda Gleser archive and Hilda research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Hilda Gleser”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Hilda Gleser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.