Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

then came the parts of Sappho, Medea and Electra. "I belong to Electra," she wrote, "I am Electra. No one else on earth exists to me now but her... I am wholly one with her, and the more I am carried away by her the more I will suffer.”

She played Goneril to József Szigeti's King Lear for thirty years. She lived the whole life of every character whose part she formed, and in order to enjoy her acting to the full she learned-the whole script, not only her own part.

In her sometimes wholly unsparing criticism of others' acting she was motivated by the very high esteem in which she held the author of the given play. She could afford to be hard on others as "she was the hardest on herself," as Ede Szigligeti commented. The expertise revealed in her studies of the character of Lady Macbeth or of Cleopatra and her astute comments on the composition of A Mid&ummer Night’i Dream would have made a professional dramaturge proud. She often appeared in stage costumes of her own design; the one she wore as Eve in The Tragedy of Man was created with the help of Árpád Feszty, the celebrated painter and Jászai’s close friend. (Feszty is said to have made two sketches for a portrait of the actress). Jászai excelled in the recitation of poetry, too, which she often did for charitable purposes. She was a great admirer of Sándor Petőfi's, of whom she wrote this: "You cannot recite, no, not recite: speak, his poems too simply." With advanced views like that she was far ahead of her times. On Every New Year's Eve she would visit the house where the poet had been born in Kiskőrös to remember and to recall his figure through his poetry. A keen traveller, she visited Italy several times, and on one of those occasions she was one of the party including the sculptor Alajos Stróbl, his sister Zsófia and their disciples, who intended to get from Rimini to Florence across the Alps on foot. (As rumour has it, only the well-built and strong sculptor managed to do so, while the others had to hire a cart.) Incidentally, Stróbl was commissioned by the writer Zsigmond Justh to immortalize Jászai in the role of Medea, but the resulting sculpture is in fact Medea through and through in the likeness, as it happens, of the actress.

The crate containing the props used in Medea, together with Jászai’s original costumes, her various personal effects and the pieces of furniture she once designed are held in the Actors’ Museum named for Gizi Bajor. The memorial plaque with her relief portrait (Zoltán Borbereki Kovács) decorate the building of the actors' home opened in 1948 at 34 Magyar utca, District V.

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