In the last weeks of World War II when the battle front swayed to and fro around Vienna, Ida Orloff died practically forgotten, in the nearby hamlet of Tullnerbach, in the fifty-seventh year of her life. Few among the villagers knew her as a once-famous star of the foremost theaters in Berlin and Vienna. In the confusion of those climactic days of the war when all newspapers had suspended publication, no notice was taken of her death and her biography has remained unwritten. Inasmuch as Gerhart Hauptmann patterned the heroines of a number of his works after the youthful actress, a brief documented account of her most unconventional life and of her relations with the great Silesian poet may be of some interest to students of the German theater of the first half of the twentieth century.