page_title: Marguerite Julie Strauss
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Marguerite Julie Strauss / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Frank Davison with Marsden Hartley and Rita Matthias in front of the Reichstag, Berlin, 1922.
context_page_description: Marguerite Julie Strauss, also known as Rita Matthias, was an actress and translator. Strauss began her acting career performing on the stage in New York City, as well as across Europe. Her theatrical connections led to a career as a translator, focusing on the works of European playwrights, the crime novels of Edgar Wallace, and the writings of Thomas Mann and his son Klaus Mann.
context_section_description: Strauss married three times. Her first marriage was to Dr. Lewis H. Marks in 1909. Marks was assistant to Paul Ehrlich at the Royal Institute for Experimental Therapy in Frankfurt-am-Main. Strauss's profile of Ehrlich was published in McClure's Magazine in 1910. In 1915, after the German war effort had taken over Marks' laboratory building for anti-aircraft purposes, the couple relocated to the Hotel Adlon in Berlin.  They divorced.
  Her next marriage was to Karl-Ernst Matthias,  and she began using the stage/pen name Rita Matthias.  They too, divorced.
  Her third and final marriage was to L. Walther Reil. For a time she went by the hyphenated Rita Matthias-Reil, and finally Rita Reil.
  Strauss was associated with the American artist Marsden Hartley and the Canadian writer Pierre Coalfleet, having met both in Berlin, in 1922. Pierre Coalfleet, nom de plume of Frank Cyril Shaw Davison, became a frequent collaborator of Strauss's (Rita Matthias). Over a 10 year period, they translated 58 plays, mostly from English into German.  Forty-nine of them were produced.
  In 1937, after Hitler's rise to power, Strauss returned to the United States. 
  The 1940 census finds her living with her husband and eight "lodgers" at 120 E. 34th Street in New York City.
caption: Rita Matthias with Marsden Hartley and Frank C. Davison. Berlin, 1922
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