Lilia Skala

Skala was born Lilia Sofer in Vienna. Her mother, Katharina Skala, was Catholic, and her father, Julius Sofer, was Jewish and worked as a manufacturer's representative for the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company.[4][5] She was one of the first women to graduate in architecture and engineering from the University of Dresden, before practicing architecture professionally in Vienna.[6]

In the late 1930s, she was forced to flee her Nazi-occupied homeland with her husband, Louis Erich Skala, and their two young sons.[5][7] (Lilia and Erich adopted the non-Jewish sounding surname of Lilia's mother.) Skala and her husband managed to escape (at different times) from Austria and eventually settled in the United States.[7]

According to Skala's son, Peter Skala's short memoir, he believes Skala developed interests in theatre when she was 14 or 15 years old. However, Skala's parents were conservative and preferred Skala to pursue a career that's more "respectable". At that time, women were not allow to study at The University of Vienna, so Skala's parents has to send her to the TU Dresden in Germany. Although there is no sufficient information about why Skala choose Architecture as her specific area of study, we do know that she excelled in a field that is traditionally dominated by male and graduated with a Summa cum Laude. Skala returned to Vienna and continued to practice architecture after the completion of her undergraduate degree. [8]

Skala never ceased searching for beauty, whether it was in architecture, or performance arts. About a year after the birth of her son, Peter Skala, she enrolled in acting lessons and rediscovered her long-lost passion for theater.[8] As her creative talents unfurled, Skala began to appear in countless television shows and serials from 1952 to 1985, such as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965. As Grand Duchess Sophie, Skala kept company on Broadway with Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam, not too many years after toiling in a Queens zipper factory as a non-English-speaking refugee from Austria.[7] She played Lisa Douglas’s mother, the Countess, on Green Acres in the 1960s.

She was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for her most famous role as the Mother Superior in 1963's Lilies of the Field opposite Oscar-winning Sidney Poitier. Skala also appeared in Ship of Fools (1965), Charly (1968), Deadly Hero (1976), Eleanor and Franklin (1976), Roseland (1977), Heartland (1979) Flashdance (1983), and House of Games (1987).[9]

Skala died in 1994 in Bay Shore, New York, of natural causes at age 98. A collection of architectural drawings that she had made as an architecture student at the University of Dresden from 1915 to 1920 was donated to the International Archives of Women in Architecture by her sons, Peter, and Martin Skala.[10] The collection is part of Skala's belongings when she fled the Nazis in 1939.[11]

Skala was a Christian Scientist.[12] She was introduced to the religion in Vienna in the 1920s.[13]

• Lilia Skala at IMDb
• Lilia Skala at Find a Grave