An old actor in Hollywood. He no longer worked. At most he occasionally did a few days for the Voice of America, reading poetry in his resonant voice in Hungarian. At the beginning of the century all Budapest was in love with this man. At the National Theatre, it was he who was the romantic lead. He was the ideal tragic hero. Hamlet, Prince Ferenc II Rákóczi, Romeo. He played Troilus opposite Vaclav Nijinsky's mother-in-law, Emma Márkus's Cressida. Oszkár Beregi was the actor who recited verse most beautifully. Rather than thundering out the words as if the intention was to put holes in the stage set, he brought out the inner music of the poetry. Such was the music he was capable of making with words that he cast a spell on his audience, as he went deep into the meaning of the words.

Beregi sat at his writing-desk in Hollywood writing his memoirs. Once upon a time he had studied philosophy, eight semesters at a university. On paper he relived his life and career, his beginnings, the struggles, the successes and his loves. We may find it tactless on his part to divulge all about his former lovers, especially since the other party in these passionate entanglements was usually quite well-known. And yet there is no indiscretion in this case. The partner in the relationship had died long before. The person doing the remembering was barely alive himself. Cut off from his country and from his profession, from the stage, cut off from his mother tongue which he spoke so beautifully; he remained alive through the tales of his old exploits. As long as he wrote, he lived.

To foreign audiences his name means nothing. Even to Hungarian aficionados of the theatre his name has lost any meaning. There is no longer anyone alive who saw him in the National Theatre at the height of his powers. A few eccentric film buffs may come across his name in the credits for some Austrian and German silent films. His most notable talking picture was directed by Fritz Lang, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1932). Film-lovers will find his name in one American film too: Mel Brooks parody, Young Frankenstein, 1974. One of the characters in it is a drunken prison guard who goes by the name of Oscar Beregi. Beregi, however, had been dead nine years by then; the prison guard is Oscar Beregi junior, his son.

This chapter of Beregi's memoirs describes his romantic liaison with the barefoot dancer, Isadora Duncan. She was a visiting performer in Budapest in the year (1906) Beregi was playing Hamlet at the National Theatre. In the same street where the National stood, at the beginning of Rákóczi út on the spot now occupied by an office building, the reformer of the dance world was performing her astonishing modern dances just a few yards further up the street in the Uránia Theatre. (This lavish moresco building still functions as the Uránia Cinema.)

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