Lilia Skala

Lilia Skala, the birth name Lilia Sofer, was an Austrian-American architect before embarking on her acting career. She was born on November 28, 1896, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary and died on December 18, 1994, making her life expansive across two centuries. Skala is remembered for her role in the film Lilies of the Field (1963) for which she received an Academy Award nomination. She was also recognized with two Golden Globe Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award nominations during her active years. Before turning her eyes to acting, Skala was a practicing architect and a pioneer in her own right, becoming one of the first female architects in Austria and the first female member of the Austrian Association of Engineers and Architects. She boasted a summa cum laude degree from the University of Dresden, now known as the Technical University of Dresden, in Germany. Her life even inspired a one-woman play titled Lilia!, penned and performed by her granddaughter Libby Skala. In the late 1930s, Skala, with her husband Louis Erich Skala and their two young sons, were forced to leave their Nazi-occupied homeland. They managed to escape Austria and make a new home in the United States. Skala rediscovered her passion for theater after the birth of her son, leading her back into the world of acting, and went on to build an enviable career appearing in many TV shows and films from 1952 to 1985. She passed away in 1994 leaving behind a collection of architectural drawings that she had made as an architecture student at the University of Dresden from 1915 to 1920, now preserved within the International Archives of Women in Architecture.