Eva Heymann was born on February 16, 1910, in Frankfurt. No details about her professional training are known, though she was engaged as an actress at the Württembergisches Landestheater in Stuttgart at the beginning of the 1929/30 season. After being dismissed in 1933 because of her Jewish background, she first went to Munich, where her parents lived, but in the months that followed resolved to go into exile. She boarded the MV Georgic in Le Havre, France, and arrived in New York on July 7, 1935.
Just one month later she became an ensemble member of the “Little Theatre” in Perth, Australia, where she began performing under the name Eva Hyde. She appears to have stayed there until at least 1936, whereupon she returned to the United States and in 1938 joined the “Continental Players”, a short-lasting theater ensemble founded by Max Reinhardt and Wilhelm Dieterle in New York to offer German-speaking actors fleeing the Nazis an artistic home. Heymann played the supporting role of Armgard in the ensemble’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, directed by Leopold Jessner and performed in numerous cities across the United States. She also played a small part in the 1940 film Babies for Sale, starring Glenn Ford.
In October of 1940 the actress married composer Werner Richard Heymann, a fellow German émigré who had come to prominence for his film scores, in Las Vegas, and in 1941 she received American citizenship. In 1952 married her second husband, Klaus Brill, an actor who had likewise fled from Germany. As an American officer, Brill had overseen the founding of “Radio München” and curated its programming in the immediate aftermath of the war. The couple settled in Los Angeles, where Heymann died on April 4, 1955.
1910 Frankfurt am Main
1955 Los Angeles