Meg Gehrts

author

Meg Gehrts

1891–1966

A pioneering figure from early cinema, she turned real-life adventures in West Africa into vivid memoir and fiction. Her work blends performance, travel writing, and the unusual perspective of someone who moved between film sets and the editing room.

1 Audiobook

A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland The adventures, observations & experiences of a cinematograph actress in West African forests whilst collecting films depicting native life and when posing as the white woman in Anglo-African cinematograph dramas

A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland The adventures, observations & experiences of a cinematograph actress in West African forests whilst collecting films depicting native life and when posing as the white woman in Anglo-African cinematograph dramas

by Meg Gehrts

About the author

Born in Hamburg in 1891 as Emma Auguste Gehrts, she became known as Meg Gehrts and built a career that crossed several creative worlds. She worked as an actress, later as a film editor, and also wrote books drawn from her experiences.

She is especially remembered for her connection to early filmmaking in West Africa and for writing A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, a memoir based on those travels and productions. Sources also describe her as having appeared in films by Hans Schomburgk, whom she later married for a short time.

Meg Gehrts died in Berlin in 1966. Today, she stands out as an intriguing early-20th-century artist whose life linked literature, cinema, and travel in a way that still feels distinctive.