The forgotten Hungarian talent, Mária Ronyecz, lived forty-five years and suffered for at least a hundred years

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Subjective preface

I already wrote before that my life in Budapest began at the József Katona Theater, where I worked as a cleaner. In every way, this environment was a great school for an eighteen-year-old girl from the countryside. I trained to be an actor, and I can’t say that I was pleased with what I experienced behind the scenes in what was undeniably the best theater in the country at the time.

Of course, I also saw Mária Ronyecz many times, even up close. Outside the stage, he constantly smoked, lit from one cigarette to another, and frequently raised his glass. Maybe he was never drunk, but he was constantly “floating”.

She was an amazingly great actress, a true tragedy, the kind of which few are born. He was given only forty-five years, but during that time he experienced as much suffering as in any other hundred years.

He grew up with his grandparents

He was born in Kunágota on June 25, 1944, and went to elementary school there, while his parents were trying to get by in Budapest in the 1950s. We don’t know much about his childhood, but it is quite certain that the constant absence of his parents may have caused him serious trauma in his early years.

It is not possible to explain to a child with logic why his parents do not live with him, why he spends his everyday life with his grandparents in the southern tip of the country. He was finally able to go to secondary school in Budapest, graduating from Lajos Kossuth Commercial Technical College. It soon became clear how talented he was, he recited many times at various events. After graduation, he was admitted to the Theater and Film Academy, but Zoltán Várkonyi did not trust him, so he worked as an English-speaking export-import accountant at Transelektro Electricity Trade Company for almost a year, and in the meantime he was a member of the amateur theater company of the FMH (Fővárosi Műlvödési Ház).

Source: Fortepan / János Kende

Finally, he joined Ottó Ádám’s class the following year: László Dózsa, Zsuzsa Liska, Annamária Szilvássy, István Uri, András Márton, Tünde Szabó, László Vajda and László Joós were his classmates, and he received his acting diploma in 1967.

“I felt like a fly stuck in a vinegar horseradish…”

He believed himself to be a “gray mouse” in college, and later said: “I felt like a fly stuck in a vinegar horseradish…”

He did not believe that he was interesting enough, talented enough, beautiful enough, even though he was given opportunities, but he could never regain the self-confidence he had lost as a child, no matter what he played and no matter how much recognition he received. Even as a college student, he was encouraged by Mária Sulyok, who was a real old woman in the theater world, and very rarely met her to encourage beginners. She felt the tragedy in him, because he was too.

Ronyecz’s fights are also characterized by the equally legendary case when, as a freshman, he appeared in The Trojan Women at the Szeged Outdoor Games. After one of the performances, he approached Zoltán Latinovits and asked him: “Zoli, will I become an actor…?” And Latinovits replied: “It won’t be… it already is…”

During his acting internship in Madách, he was able to tour the world performing the “Beggar’s Opera” due to his one-sentence role, something that quite a few people had the opportunity to do at the end of the sixties.

The troupe traveled from Moscow to Turin, and he always said only this on stage: “But you’re laughing strangely, Jenny…”

Fate compensated him later, because in the National, in 1981, he could already be the title character: Kocsma Jenny. It was played in a different translation under the title Opera in Three Acts, but it was the same play: yes, he laughed strangely and sang heartbreakingly, directed by Yuri Lyubimov in a cult performance.

After three years in Pécs, Budapest

After college, he got a contract in Pécs and also a lot of opportunities. As an actor from Pécs, at the age of only 24, he was able to play the role of Gertrudis in the television adaptation of Bánk bán, directed by Miklós Szinetár. This is not an everyday chance for a career beginner playing in the countryside, since at that time almost the whole country followed the TV games, so the face, name and voice of Mária Ronyecz quickly became known.

Recording of the TV version of József Katona’s drama Bánk bán in the MTV studio. Zoltán Latinovits as Bánk and Mária Ronyecz as Gertrudis – Source: Fortepan / Zoltán Szalay

(Theater-going members of my generation still knew exactly how great an actress she was, but no one at WMN, for example, knew who she was at first when I indicated that I would like to write an article for the eightieth anniversary of her birth.)

He was able to play about twenty roles in this short time in Pécs, followed by twelve years in the National team, where he was also given significant roles, even though it was during that period that the former director, Tamás Major, and his successor, Endre Marton, fought with each other. I wrote about this a few years ago.

Orphan Kata Bethlen

In the mid-seventies, several monodramas earned the recognition of the audience: Mari Szemes shone as Médea, and Éva Ruttkai shone as Lotte alone on stage. In 1975, Ronyecz also came up with an unheard of success monodrama: Kata Árva Bethlen, which he performed in the Royal Cellar of the Buda Castle.

Ronyecz, who rarely speaks, talked at length about this role with Anna Földes, it is worth it to read your mature thoughtshis responsible and conscious attitude, his doubts and the slight joy that the unanimous professional and public success gave him.

To put it mildly, it was not difficult for him to identify with orphanhood.

By the way, he once said, when asked about his acting dreams, that he doesn’t have one: “I even play the chair leg, that’s why I became an actor”.

Movies in all quantities

We saw Mária Ronyecz in many different films, she played in Sevasz, Vera! in the famous movie theater and also in Füyok a téren. Love Emília Ódor! I also loved her role as a nun in the Sándor Pál movie. In Gothár–Bereményi’s film Megáll az vítá, it was shocking how she brought the ill-fated teacher “Pickleface” to life.

In the movie Bespectacled, he actually got to wear his iconic glasses, something he rarely got to do on stage. In the end, she even appeared in the television series Linda in the role of a detective who is attracted to the arts and is not suitable for investigations, this was her last film appearance.

In the TV series Linda – Source: Hungarian Television

Big roles in Katona

Many people from the Nemzeti left with him (for example Hilda Gobbi and Major Tamás) in 1982 from the former chamber theater of the Nemzeti to the József Katona Theater, founded by Gábor Székely and Gábor Zsámbéki.

This was his last company where he played until his death, and he was truly surrounded by an intellectual environment that he had always missed.

I’ve only seen him live here, Schwajda (Holy Family) and Spiro (Chicken head) he also excelled in his plays. I also watched Coriolanus many times. In her last role, she appeared as a dying wife in Elias Canetti’s Wedding. The performance was eerie and harrowing because while playing the dying wife, she was really dying and really becoming a wife again.

A strange love

When it turned out that she was incurable, and the cancer almost devoured her entire jaw, Péter Gál Molnár, the openly gay, feared theater critic, remarried Mária Ronyecz and persistently cared for her until her death.

They had been married and divorced once, but the strange emotional bond between them was never broken. It was rumored that Ronyecz was actually attracted to women, but he never admitted it. On the other hand, an alibi relationship came in handy for MGP, because he was turned into an informant, persecuted and blackmailed by the system for being attracted to his own sex.

MGP was an extremely divisive figure in Hungarian cultural public life, either loved or hated. His vitriolic style and sharp language were always ready to answer when someone objected to one of his criticisms. THE Coming out in his book, published after his death, the following testimony can be read about their relationship:

“I’m out of clean shirts. Ronyecz offered to wash. We went to the bathroom. The shirts remained unwashed.”

This passion belonged to only one woman throughout MGP’s life, and that was Mária Ronyecz.

This is how Mihály Kornis wrote in Litera in his blog About Mária Ronyecz and her love affair with MGP – long after their death, in 2018:

“Mari, what did you drink for? Before you got sick, let’s call it that, if I saw you in an actor’s bar or in a TV show, from the corner of the room, anywhere, usually for weeks in a foggy state, after that my soul wandered around you, you went back and forth in my head. […] You could be in big trouble if Péter Molnár Gál became the I-don’t-know-what. Your curse on yourself.

“I understand, you understand, that’s how you understand that I don’t understand, but you understand.”

You played MGP’s wife, let all the seventy-seven dwarves, all the directors I feel like believe me, as soon as you remember that you are a hopeless case…”

It’s over, it’s never over…

The figure and voice of Mária Ronyecz live on here even though she has already moved to the afterlife 35 years ago.

I can’t get rid of the thought that all this suffering could have been avoided if his parents had decided not to let him grow up with his grandparents, but to take him in and cherish him every blessed day.

He was looking for this cherishing all his life, and therefore he was not able to reconcile with himself. Unfortunately, the self-destructive lifestyle soon took its toll. Yet he could have shone in so many other wonderful roles!

He left in the fullness of his strength, in the prime of his life, and it is for nothing that Attila József says so touchingly beautifully You will get old his poem, he could never grow old, and he could never be uncloudedly young…

Sources: ITT, ITT, ITT, ITT, ITT and ITT

Featured image: Fortepan / Zoltán Szalay

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