Hollywood Refugees

Her father was a police lieutenant and imbued in her a military attitude to life. Marlene was known in school for her "bedroom eyes" and her first affairs were at this stage in her life - a professor at the school was terminated. She entered the cabaret scene in 1920s Germany, first as a spectator then as a cabaret singer. In 1923, she married and, although she and Rudolf Sieber lived together only 5 years, they remained married until his death. She was in over a dozen silent films in increasingly important roles. In 1929, she was seen in a Berlin cabaret by Josef von Sternberg and, after a screen test, captured the role of the cabaret singer in The Blue Angel (1930) (and became von Sternberg's lover). With the success of this film, von Sternberg immediately took her to Hollywood, introducing her to the world in Morocco (1930), and signing an agreement to produce all her films. A series of successes followed, and Marlene became the highest paid actress of her time, but her later films in the mid-part of the decade were critical and popular failures. She returned to Europe at the end of the decade, with a series of affairs with former leading men (she had a reputation of romancing her co-stars), as well as other prominent artistic figures. In 1939, an offer came to star with James Stewart in a western and, after initial hesitation, she accepted. The film was Destry Rides Again (1939) - the siren of film could also be a comedienne and a remarkable comeback was reality. She toured extensively for the allied effort in WW II (she had become a United States citizen) and, after the war, limited her cinematic life. But a new career as a singer and performer appeared, with reviews and shows in Las Vegas, touring theatricals, and even Broadway. New success was accompanied by a too close acquaintance with alcohol, until falls in her performance eventually resulted in a compound fracture of the leg. Although the last 13 years of her life were spent in seclusion in her apartment in Paris, with the last 12 years in bed, she had withdrawn only from public life and maintained active telephone and correspondence contact with friends and associates.

Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. Wilder immediately realized his Jewish ancestry would cause problems, so he emigrated to Paris, then the US. Although he spoke no English when he arrived in Hollywood, Wilder was a fast learner and thanks to contacts such as Peter Lorre (with whom he shared an apartment), he was able to break into American films. His partnership with Charles Brackett started in 1938 and the team was responsible for writing some of Hollywood's classic comedies, including Ninotchka (1939) and Ball of Fire (1941). The partnership expanded into a producer-director one in 1942, with Brackett producing and the two turned out such classics as Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The Lost Weekend (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) (Oscars for Best Screenplay), after which the partnership dissolved. (Wilder had already made one film, Double Indemnity (1944) without Brackett, as the latter had refused to work on a film he felt dealt with such disreputable characters.) Wilder's subsequent self-produced films would become more caustic and cynical, notably Ace in the Hole (1951), though he also produced such sublime comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960) (which won him Best Picture and Director Oscars). He retired in 1981.

Otto Ludwig Preminger was born in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. His father was a prosecutor, and Otto originally intended to follow his father into a law career; however, he fell in love with the theater in his 20's and became one of the most imaginative stage producers and directors. He was only 24 when engaged by Max Reinhardt to take over his theatre where he produced all kids of plays. He directed his first film in 1931, and came to the US in 1936 to direct 'Libel' on the Broadway stage. He then moved to Hollywood where he signed with Fox becoming the first independent producer / director .He alternated between stage and film until the great success of Laura (1944) made him an A-list director in Hollyood.

For two decades after "Laura was released in 1944, Preminger ranked as one of the top directors in the world. His powers began to wane after Advise & Consent (1962), and by the end of the decade, he was considered washed-up. However, such was the potency of his craftsmanship that he continued to direct major motion pictures into the 1970s, with Rosebud (1975) getting scathing reviews. His last directorial effort was The Human Factor (1979), which won him respectful notices.

Otto Preminger died on April 23, 1986 in New York City from the effects of lung cancer and Alzheimer's disease. He was 80 years old.

Ingrid Bergman was one of the greatest actresses from Hollywood's lamented Golden Era. Her natural and unpretentious beauty and her immense acting talent made her one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American cinema. Bergman is also one of the most Oscar-awarded actresses, tied with Meryl Streep and Frances McDormand, all three of them second only to Katharine Hepburn.

Ingrid Bergman was born on August 29, 1915 in Stockholm, Sweden, to a German mother, Frieda Henrietta (Adler), and a Swedish father, Justus Samuel Bergman, an artist and photographer. Her mother died when she was only two and her father died when she was 12. She went to live with an elderly uncle.

The woman who would be one of the top stars in Hollywood in the 1940s had decided to become an actress after finishing her formal schooling. She had had a taste of acting at age 17 when she played an uncredited role of a girl standing in line in the Swedish film Landskamp (1932) in 1932 - not much of a beginning for a girl who would be known as "Sweden's illustrious gift to Hollywood." Her parents died when she was just a girl and the uncle she lived with didn't want to stand in the way of Ingrid's dream. The next year she enrolled at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm but decided that stage acting was not for her. It would be three more years before she would have another chance at a film. When she did, it was more than just a bit part. The film in question was The Count of the Old Town (1935), where she had a speaking part as Elsa Edlund. After several films that year that established her as a class actress, Ingrid appeared in Intermezzo (1936) as Anita Hoffman. Luckily for her, American producer David O. Selznick saw it and sent a representative from Selznick International Pictures to gain rights to the story and have Ingrid signed to a contract. Once signed, she came to California and starred in United Artists' 1939 remake of her 1936 film, Intermezzo (1939), reprising her original role. The film was a hit and so was Ingrid.

Her beauty was unlike anything the movie industry had seen before and her acting was superb. Hollywood was about to find out that they had the most versatile actress the industry had ever seen. Here was a woman who truly cared about the craft she represented. The public fell in love with her. Ingrid was under contract to go back to Sweden to film Only One Night (1939) in 1939 and June Night (1940) in 1940. Back in the US she appeared in three films, all well-received. She made only one film in 1942, but it was the classic Casablanca (1942) opposite Humphrey Bogart.

Ingrid was choosing her roles well. In 1943 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), the only film she made that year. The critics and public didn't forget her when she made Gaslight (1944) the following year--her role of Paula Alquist got her the Oscar for Best Actress. In 1945 Ingrid played in Spellbound (1945), Saratoga Trunk (1945) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), for which she received her third Oscar nomination for her role of Sister Benedict. She made no films in 1947, but bounced back with a fourth nomination for Joan of Arc (1948). In 1949 she went to Italy to film Stromboli (1950), directed by Roberto Rossellini. She fell in love with him and left her husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and daughter, Pia Lindström. America's "moral guardians" in the press and the pulpits were outraged. She was pregnant and decided to remain in Italy, where her son was born. In 1952 Ingrid had twins, Isotta and Isabella Rossellini, who became an outstanding actress in her own right, as did Pia.

Ingrid continued to make films in Italy and finally returned to Hollywood in 1956 in the title role in Anastasia (1956), which was filmed in England. For this she won her second Academy Award. She had scarcely missed a beat. Ingrid continued to bounce between Europe and the US making movies, and fine ones at that. A film with Ingrid Bergman was sure to be a quality production. In her final big-screen performance in 1978's Autumn Sonata (1978) she had her final Academy Award nomination. Though she didn't win, many felt it was the most sterling performance of her career. Ingrid retired, but not before she gave an outstanding performance in the mini-series A Woman Called Golda (1982), a film about Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. For this she won an Emmy Award as Best Actress, but, unfortunately, she did not live to see the fruits of her labor.

Ingrid died from cancer on August 29, 1982, her 67th birthday, in London, England.

Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy in the Slovak area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. He learned both Hungarian and German languages from birth, and was educated in elementary and secondary schools in the Austria-Hungary capitol Vienna, but did not complete. As a youth he ran away from home, first working as a bank clerk, and after stage training in Vienna, Austria, made his acting debut at age 17 in 1922 in Zurich, Switzerland. He traveled for several years acting on stage throughout his home region, Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich, including working with Bertolt Brecht, until Fritz Lang cast him in a starring role as the psychopathic child killer in the German film M (1931).

After several more films in Germany, including a couple roles for which he learned to speak French, Lorre left as the Nazis came to power, going first to Paris where he made one film, then London where Alfred Hitchcock cast him as a creepy villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), where he learned his lines phonetically, and finally arrived in Hollywood in 1935. In his first two roles there he starred as a mad scientist in Mad Love (1935) directed by recent fellow-expatriate Karl Freund, and the leading part of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1935), by another expatriate German director Josef von Sternberg, a successful movie made at Lorre's own suggestion. He returned to England for a role in another Hitchcock film, Secret Agent (1936), then back to the US for a few more films before checking into a rehab facility to cure himself of a morphine addiction.

After shaking his addiction, in order to get any kind of acting work, Lorre reluctantly accepted the starring part as the Japanese secret agent in Thank You, Mr. Moto (1937), wearing makeup to alter his already very round eyes for the part. He ended up committed to repeating the role for eight more "Mr. Moto" movies over the next two years.

Lorre played numerous memorable villain roles, spy characters, comedic roles, and even a romantic type, throughout the 1940s, beginning with his graduation from 30s B-pictures The Maltese Falcon (1941). Among his most famous films, Casablanca (1942), and a comedic role in the Broadway hit film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

After the war, between 1946 and '49 Lorre concentrated largely on radio and the stage, while continuing to appear in movies. In Autumn 1950 he traveled to West Gemany where he wrote, directed and starred in the critically acclaimed but generally unknown German-language film The Lost Man (1951), adapted from Lorre's own novel.

Lorre returned to the US in 1952, somewhat heavier in stature, where he used his abilities as a stage actor appearing in many live television productions throughout the 50s, including the first James Bond adaptation Casino Royale (1954), broadcast just a few months after Ian Fleming had published that first Bond novel. In that decade, Lorre had various roles, often to type but also as comedic caricatures of himself, in many episodes of TV series, and variety shows, though he continued to work in motion pictures, including the Academy Award winning Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and a stellar role as a clown in The Big Circus (1959).

In the late 50s and early 1960s he worked in several low-budget films, with producer-director Roger Corman, and producer-writer-director Irwin Allen, including the aforementioned The Big Circus and two adventurous Disney movies with Allen. He died from a stroke the year he made his last movie, playing a stooge in Jerry Lewis' The Patsy (1964).

Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.

In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.

Pola Negri was born in Lipno, Poland, and moved to Warsaw as a child. Living in poverty with her mother, a teenage Pola auditioned and was accepted to the Imperial Ballet. Due to an illness that ended her dancing career, she soon switched to the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts and became an actress. By 17 she was a star on the Warsaw stage, but World War I would soon change the theater scene. Without the theater, Pola turned to films. With her new career in pictures and her stage success in "Sumurun", she went to Berlin and was teamed with German director Ernst Lubitsch. The Lubitsch-Negri combination was very successful and the roles that Pola played were earthy, exotic, strong women. One of her films, Passion (1919), was optioned and retitled "Passion" for exhibition in America. The film was such a success that by 1922 she and Lubitsch were both given contracts to work in Hollywood. While her first few films showed some success, they were overshadowed by her reported romances with such stars as Charles Chaplin and Rudolph Valentino. Forbidden Paradise (1924), made with Lubitsch, and Hotel Imperial (1927) were two of her more successful films. However, three things conspired to end her career in Hollywood: (1) The perception that her mourning for Rudolph Valentino was insincere, though Negri did describe him as the love of her life; (2) The Hays Office codes that would not allow her to show the very traits that made her a sex-siren in Europe; (3) Her thick Polish accent would not play in the sound pictures that were coming into vogue.

Pola Negri returned to Europe and eventually made films for UFA, which was under Nazi management. In 1941 she returned to America penniless. She made Hi Diddle Diddle (1943) and became an American citizen in 1951. Her next and last movie was The Moon-Spinners (1964).

She died of pneumonia in San Antonio, TX, in 1987.

The daughter of a fur wholesaler in Norway, Sonja Henie received her first pair of ice skates when she was six. At 14 she was the Norwegian Skating Champion. At 15 she would win the Olympic gold medal in Skating, a feat she would repeat in 1932 and 1936. In 1936 she would turn professional and tour with her own ice show. She was signed by 20th Century-Fox and debuted in One in a Million (1936), in which she played an ice skater. The picture was very successful, Sonja continued to make a series of light comedies throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s. More a testament to her skating skills and physical appearance than her acting prowess, the films were nevertheless profitable and her popularity soared. Her films' success garnered financial success for the Hollywood Ice Revues that she produced and starred every year. Her movie career wound down during the mid-'40s, but she continued skating until she retired in 1960. An astute businesswoman and due to marrying shipping magnate Niels Onstad ("the Onassis of Norway") in 1956, Sonja was one of the ten wealthiest women in the world when she died of leukemia in 1969.

Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Her parents were both from Jewish families. Hedwig had a calm childhood, but it was cinema that fascinated her. By the time she was a teenager, she decided to drop out of school and seek fame as an actress, and was a student of theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Her first role was a bit part in the German film Geld auf der Straße (1930) (aka "Money on the Street") in 1930. She was attractive and talented enough to be in three more German productions in 1931, but it would be her fifth film that catapulted her to worldwide fame. In 1932 she appeared in a Czech film called Ekstase (US title: "Ecstasy") and had made the gutsy move to appear nude. It's the story of a young girl who is married to a gentleman much older than she, but she winds up falling in love with a young soldier. The film's nude scenes created a sensation all over the world. The scenes, very tame by today's standards, caused the film to be banned by the U.S. government at the time.

Hedy soon married Fritz Mandl, a munitions manufacturer and a prominent Austrofascist. He attempted to buy up all the prints of "Ecstasy" he could lay his hands on (Italy's dictator, Benito Mussolini, had a copy but refused to sell it to Mandl), but to no avail (there are prints floating around the world today). The notoriety of the film brought Hollywood to her door. She was brought to the attention of MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to a contract (a notorious prude when it came to his studio's films, Mayer signed her against his better judgment, but the money he knew her notoriety would bring in to the studio overrode any moral concerns he may have had). However, he insisted she change her name and make good, wholesome films.

Hedy starred in a series of exotic adventure epics. She made her American film debut as Gaby in Algiers (1938). This was followed a year later by Lady of the Tropics (1939). In 1942, she played the plum role of Tondelayo in the classic White Cargo (1942). After World War II, her career began to decline, and MGM decided it would be in the interest of all concerned if her contract were not renewed. Unfortunately for Hedy, she turned down the leads in both Gaslight (1940) and Casablanca (1942), both of which would have cemented her standing in the minds of the American public. In 1949, she starred as Delilah opposite Victor Mature's Samson in Cecil B. DeMille's epic Samson and Delilah (1949). This proved to be Paramount Pictures' then most profitable movie to date, bringing in $12 million in rental from theaters. The film's success led to more parts, but it was not enough to ease her financial crunch. She made only six more films between 1949 and 1957, the last being The Female Animal (1958).

Hedy retired to Florida. She died there, in the city of Casselberry, on January 19, 2000.

Paul Henreid was born Paul Georg Julius Freiherr von Hernreid Ritter von Wasel-Waldingau in Trieste, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the son of Marie Luise Heilig (Lendecke) and Baron Karl Alphons Hernreid, an aristocratic banker and financial adviser to Emperor Franz Josef, who was born to a Jewish family and whose name was changed from Carl Hirsch to Karl von Hernreid as he converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1904 due to anti-semitism in Austria-Hungary.

Paul grew up in Vienna and studied at the prestigious Maria Theresa Academy (graduating in 1927) and the Institute of Graphic Arts. For four years, he worked as translator and book designer for a publishing outfit run by Otto Preminger, while training to be an actor at night. Preminger was also a protégé (and managing director) of Max Reinhardt. After attending one of Henreid's acting school performances, Preminger introduced him to the famous stage director and this led to a contract. In 1933, Paul made his debut at the Reinhardt Theatre in "Faust". He subsequently had several leading roles on the stage and appeared in a couple of Austrian films. Paul, like his character Victor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942), was avidly anti-fascist. He accordingly left continental Europe and went to London in 1935, first appearing on stage as Prince Albert in "Victoria the Great" two years later.

Henreid made his English-speaking motion picture debut in the popular drama Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), as the sympathetic German master Max Staefel, who proves to be Chipping's truest friend and ally. After that, however, he became incongruously typecast as Nazi henchmen in Mad Men of Europe (1940) and Night Train to Munich (1940). That year, he moved to the United States (becoming a citizen the following year) and quickly established himself on Broadway with "Flight to the West", as a Ribbentrop-type Nazi consul. His powerful performance led to radio work in the serial "Joyce Jordan-Girl Interne" and a film contract with RKO in 1941.

This marked a turning point in Paul Henreid's career. He finally escaped the stereotypical Teutonic image and began to play heroic or romantic leads, his first being Joan of Paris (1942), opposite Michèle Morgan, as French RAF pilot Paul Lavallier. Significantly, his next film, Now, Voyager (1942), defined his new screen persona: debonnaire, cultured and genteel, lighting two cigarettes simultaneously, then passing one to Bette Davis. According to Henreid, this legendary (and later often lampooned) scene was almost cut from the film because the director, Irving Rapper, had concerns about it. Next came "Casablanca", where Henreid played the idealistic, sensitive patriot Victor Laszlo; the poorly received Bronte sisters biopic Devotion (1946), as an Irish priest; and a stalwart performance as a Polish count and Ida Lupino's love interest, In Our Time (1944).

After several dull romantic leads, Henreid reinvented himself yet again. He played a memorably athletic and lively Dutch pirate, the 'Barracuda', in RKO's colourful swashbuckler The Spanish Main (1945). Another of his best later performances was as a sadistic South African commandant in the underrated film noir Rope of Sand (1949), which re-united him with his former "Casablanca" co-stars Peter Lorre and Claude Rains. After the Arabian Technicolor adventure, Thief of Damascus (1952), Henreid's star began to fade. His last noteworthy appearance during the fifties was as an itinerant magician in the oriental extravaganza Siren of Bagdad (1953) . The most memorable of several in-jokes, had Henreid lighting two hookahs (water pipes) for one of his harem girls, spoofing his famous scene from "Now, Voyager".

Outspoken in his opposition to McCarthyism and adhering to his rights under the First Amendment, he was subsequently blacklisted as a "communist sympathizer" by the House Committee on Un- American Activities. In spite of the damage this did to his career, he re-emerged as a director of second features and television episodes for Screen Gems, Desilu and other companies. In 1957, Alfred Hitchcock (in defiance of the blacklist) hired him to direct several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955). Towards the end of his career, Paul Henreid directed his former "Now, Voyager" co-star Bette Davis in the camp melodrama Dead Ringer (1963) and toured with Agnes Moorehead on stage in a short-lived revival of "Don Juan in Hell" (1972- 73). Henreid died of pneumonia in a Santa Monica hospital in April 1992, after having suffered a stroke. He has the distinction of having not just one but two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for his films, and one for his television work.

Max Reinhardt was from an Austrian merchant family (surname officially changed from the family name Goldmann to Reinhardt in 1904), and even as a boy, after his family moved to Vienna, he haunted the "Hofburg Theater" and tried to see every play. In 1890 he studied at the Sulkowsky Theater in Matzleinsdorf and started acting in Vienna and later at the "Stadtheater" in Salzburg with duties as an assistant director. But by 1894 he was invited to Berlin by Otto Brahm, director, critic, and theater manager. And that was an important juncture. Brahm had founded the "Free Stage" (1890), a theater company crusading for realism in German theater by providing a forum for so-called banned plays - the iconoclastic works, such as, those of Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy. The result was the opening of German state theater to the corpus of the modern stage by 1894. Brahm became director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, and there Reinhardt cut his teeth on the full theater experience, not simply acting alone, although he was much applauded for his convincing specialty of playing old men.

In 1901 Reinhardt co-founded his own - sort of avant garde - cabaret "Schall und Rauch" (Sound and Smoke) for experimental theater. It was renamed "Kleines Theater" (Small Theater) in 1902, a place for contemporary plays accented with the sort of spirit confined to cabaret entertainment. He then opened and managed his own theater "Neues Theater", now called the "Berliner Ensemble", from 1902 to 1905. These were all a part of his evolving philosophy of the harmony of stage design, costumes, language, music, and choreography as a whole unified artwork, Gesamtkunstwerk. He was influenced by several figures, August Strindberg for one, but most significantly by Richard Wagner and his operatic ideal that the director must pull together all aspects of art in his production. Reinhardt's infusion gave new dimensions to German theater. After producing more than fifty plays at Neues Theater, wherein he always found somebody to donate the money for productions, he was asked to take the helm of Deutsches Theater in Berlin for Brahm in 1905. At Deutsches Theater he embarked on big theater, employing the whole physical theater space for productions and often even spreading scenes into the audience as a means of fusing actors and audience in a total theater experience. Here was something different - making theater a democratic institution - after all the audience was the means of generating the money to do more. And Reinhardt was never avant garde enough to disdain making profit when it finally came knocking. He staged truly gargantuan productions of epic pageantry and lighting with stark colors for various dramatic effects. He staged one of his most famous early productions, his first rendition of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with a wooded forest revolving stage - turning to reveal progressive new scenes. He became famous for realistic direction of huge crowd and mob scenes.

He built the smaller Kammerspiele, a theater near Deutsches Theater in 1906. At this latter theater Reinhardt developed "Kammerspiel" theater, chamber dramas in a minimalist and naturalistic style. This followed from his expressionist influences which defied the realist dictum (though he would look to realism as well in the mix to appropriately stage some of his most ambitious efforts) and sought out more personal, expressive, and emphatic ways of coaxing the elements of theater from the conventional objective into palpable subjectivity. This all opened Reinhardt to even more experimental ideas in staging with sometimes nightmarish and vivid lighting techniques. He began introducing the expressionist plays to the German-speaking public. And he also opened a famous acting school which would function for decades turning out many of Germany's great actors and actresses. In addition there was a acting troupe that played in neutral areas of Europe during World War I. On the bill was always a cycle of Shakespeare plays. Reinhardt did everything in a big way and to accommodate a growing enthusiastic theater-going public he had expanded with a chain of theaters throughout Germany. He would manage thirty theaters and acting companies in all.

Reihardt fulfilled another of his ideals, and that was of finding the 'perfect playhouse' as a means of complementing the content and experience of a play. In 1919 he opened an enormous arena theater, the "Grosses Schauspielhaus", (Great Playhouse), but known as the "Theatre of the Five Thousand", which included a large revolving stage. Many of his biggest productions were done here, including Shakespeare and Greek plays. In the 1920s he built the two Boulevard Theaters on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. And yet, the privations of post-war Germany and the perennial anti-Semitic undercurrent caused a gradual loss of his big audiences. In 1920 Reinhardt went back to Salzburg and established the Salzburg Festival with composer Richard Strauss and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Annually he enjoyed staging the most apropos of morality plays, the medieval "Everyman", with the biggest set he could muster as a backdrop-the Austrian Alps in the open air before the Salzburg Cathedral. From 1924 he became director of the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna and renewed his Berlin popularity with a new theater called "Komoedie". His output was no less than astounding. Whereas a theater director today would not commit himself beyond two or three productions in a year, Reinhardt averaged twenty in his first twelve years. Between 1916 and 1917 he produced 48 - his highest output. Although he did few films, he was very interested in the potential of the medium. He directed four silent movies starting in 1910. One of these was the filming of one his favorite pantomime plays "The Miracle".

Reinhardt was a titan of influence and inspiration on a whole generation of theater and film directors in Germany-many who spread the word to the rest of the world. His disciples included: F.W. Murnau, Paul Leni, Ernst Lubitsch, William Dieterle , and Otto Preminger. His staging of crowds and use of lighting were frequently appropriated by the great silent filmmakers of the Weimar Republic, including 'Fritz Lang' and Murnau. And he profoundly influenced the expressionist movement in German film. He also influenced many actors with his techniques of developing expressive characterizations and movement-many would eventually come to New York and Hollywood. But by 1933 Hitler had come to power, and Reinhardt found himself falling victim to the same methods of attrition as other German Jews. So-called assimilative families of ethnic mixtures, whether high or low, were increasing placed in the same category as ethnic Jews. His theaters were `appropriated' one-by-one by the government and later his considerable properties confiscated. Later in 1933 he moved back to Austria to the "Theater in der Josefstadt" in Vienna (where Preminger had quickly become a director), hoping his native land could resist the Nazi machine. But the same pressures enveloped him there. He left for a last theater tour of Europe and arrived in America in 1934. "Midsummer" had a special significance for Reinhardt. The play was his continued inspiration of a world without ideologies - a utopia - as the theater itself was a haven from the harsh realities of the world and of the individual. The audience learned something, but they also could steep themselves without taxing imagination in the illusion of theater. "Midsummer" was always a work-in-progress for him - he had staged it twelve times up to 1934, and in fact had already brought it to Broadway in late 1927. And that was not his first trip to the US, having started presenting plays as producer, director, or writer since early 1912 there (he did ten productions in all to 1943).

He came to Hollywood in 1934 with his fame preceding him. His last tour through Europe had included lavish productions in Florence (1933) and a"Midsummer" at Oxford (1934). He offered to do the same in Hollywood at an ideal outdoor stage-the Hollywood Bowl. But the bowl had to go - it was removed to provide a view of a "forest" up the hillside - a "forest" that required tons of dirt hauled in especially for its planting, Reinhardt and his design staff erected a 250-foot wide, 100-foot deep stage. Also included was a pond and a suspension bridge or trestle constructed from the hills in back to the stage to be lined with torchbearers - with real flaming torches - for the wedding procession inserted between Acts IV and V. This lavish production included a ballet corps, children playing faeries, and hundreds of extras. The 18-year-old Olivia de Havilland was at Mills College in Oakland, participating in a school "Midsummer" production where in attendance was none other than Max Reinhardt himself. He was so impressed with her that he picked her for his extravaganza. Along with other Hollywood actors, was 14 year old veteran of the cinema 'Mickey Rooney', added to the cast as Puck. Another new arrival from Austria was classical opera composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, musical collaborator of Reinhardt's from Vienna. Reinhardt cabled his friend to come over and help him by doing the orchestrations of Felix Mendelssohn's famous 1843 music for the Hollywood Bowl production. It was a night to remember - even for Jack L. Warner - who was not always sure of what he was seeing. But it was enough to sign Reinhardt to direct a filmed version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) which began shooting in December of 1934. De Havilland was back to start her film career-Rooney for another memorable part. Otherwise, it was new cast headed by Hollywood stars 'Dick Powell' and James Cagney and boasting the best actors from Warner's impressive stock company of players. Since Reinhardt did not know Hollywood filmmaking, Warner assigned a co-director, William Dieterle, Reinhardt's acting then directing protege, from the Deutsches Theater days in Berlin. Dieterle, the disciple, had directed in Germany since 1923 and then came to Hollywood to become one of the studio's most reliable new directors. It was the beginning of Korngold's screen career as a film composer when he was hired to do the film score, an arrangement based on Mendelssohn's music used at the Bowl. But he actually mixed in much more of a variety of the composer's music to fit the play. Warner's laid down 1.5 million dollars and had its top technical staff step up to the challenge. But all-most of all, Reinhardt - was on a bit of a learning curve. Reinhardt was allowed the liberty of long play-like rehearsals instead of rehearsing scene by scene. Reinhardt's early over-emphasized stage acting directions were recalled by Cagney, who noted the actors often stood around on the sidelines whispering to one another, "Somebody ought to tell him." It was the politic Dieterle who did - setting his old master straight as to the subtle wonders of the microphone and sound film techniques. Shakespeare's lines were cut for public consumption, but there was so much to see - who would notice. In Depression era America the movie theater had taken the place of Reinhardt's all encompassing theater as a haven - and that was certainly fine with him. And here was a feast for starving souls. Reinhardt's multi-faceted approach to theater shone in all its entertaining best-through Warner stage design efficiency. There was the realist extravagance in forested backdrops, but the wonderful ballet of the coming of night with dancer Nini Theilade was distilled expressionism. Other ballet sequences featuring the fairies-children and adults - were choreographed by 'Bronislava Nijinska' (the great Nijinsky's sister). Reinhardt conjured all his and the camera's magic to create the summation of a lifetime of stagecraft. His imaginative wizardry with lighting put the remarkable glow on the faces of Cagney and his motley peasant comrades as they rehearsed - on the dancing faeries in their sequins - on the enchanted sparkle of shimmering (painted and tensiled) woods and veiled atmosphere that awaited the gaiety of Titania and the black looks of King Oberon. Everything of British and German folklore was thrown in for good measure - from gossamer English faeries and magic animals to rather frightening, rubber-masked dwarfs dressed as Teutonic gnomes and goblins. Reinhardt fuzzed and gauzed the camera lens and even put scintillating borders and covers of various sorts on the camera cowling to frame some faerie scenes as if from a Victorian painting by English artists Richard Dadd and Joseph Noel Paton-obvious influences. The movie was not a box office success, but it was Hollywood history-salute to Shakespeare? - certainly - but more so, a great event of melting pot talent and modern film making that was Hollywood coupled with profound European stage traditions that began with Max Reinhardt. He - by the way - did no more films, perhaps deciding that the real challenge was still the stage. But this one record on sound film measures the genius of the man of theater and gives today a glimpse of his creative powers and something of what his stage productions were like. He was more interested in continuing working on-stage as a director and producer, but he did not forsake Hollywood. With his second wife actress 'Helene Thimig', from a famous Viennese acting family, he split his time between the coasts. He found a Hollywood-based theater workshop and an acting school in New York. All of Reinhardt's productions were tallied - just from 1905 to 1930 - and found to total 23,374 performances of 452 plays - and still a little short. His wide-eyed exuberance for spreading out a great show was indicative of the child in Max Reinhardt. He betrayed that very comparison unashamedly: "Theater is the happiest haven for those who have secretly put their childhood in their pockets, so that they can continue to play to the end of their days."

Initially grew up wanting to be a violinist, but while at the University of Vienna decided to study law. While doing so, he became increasingly interested in American film and decided that was what he wanted to do. He became involved in European filmaking for a short time before going to America to study film.

Robert Siodmak (8 August 1900 - 10 March 1973) was a German-born, American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of stylish, unpretentious Hollywood films noirs he made in the 1940s.

Siodmak (pronounced SEE-ODD-MACK) was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of Rosa Philippine (née Blum) and Ignatz Siodmak. His parents were both from Jewish families in Leipzig (the myth of his American birth in Memphis, Tennessee was necessary for him to obtain a visa in Paris during World War II). He worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925 (Bernhardt would direct a film of Siodmak's story "Conflict" in 1945). At twenty-six he was hired by his cousin, producer Seymour Nebenzal, to assemble original silent movies from stock footage of old films. Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent chef d'oeuvre, "Menschen am Sonntag" ("People on Sunday") in1929. The script was co-written by Billy Wilder and Siodmak's brother Curt Siodmak, later the screenwriter of "The Wolf Man" (1941). It was the last German silent and also included such future Hollywood artists as Fred Zinnemann, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Eugen Schufftan. His next film--the first at UFA to use sound--was the 1930 comedy "Abschied" for writers Emeric Pressburger and Irma von Cube, followed by "Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht," another comedy, yet quite different and unusual, a likely product of Billy Wilder's imagination (remade a noir, "DOA," in 1950). But in his next film, the crime thriller "Stürme der Leidenschaft," with Emil Jannings and Anna Sten, Siodmak found a style that would become his own.

With the rise of Nazism and following an attack in the press by Hitler's minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1933 after viewing "Brennendes Geheimnis" ("The Burning Secret"), Siodmak left Germany for Paris. His creativity flourished, as he worked for the next six years in a variety of film genres, from comedy ("Le sexe fable" and "La Vie Parisienne" ) to musical ("La crise est finie," with Danielle Darrieux) to drama ("Mister Flow," "Cargaison blanche," "Mollenard"--compare Gabrielle Dorziat's shrewish wife with that of Rosalind Ivan's in "The Suspect"--and the superb "Pièges," with Maurice Chevalier and Erich Von Stroheim). While in France, he was well on his way to becoming successor to Rene Clair, until Hitler again forced him out. Siodmak arrived in Hollywood in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.

Beginning in 1941, he first turned out several B-films and programmers for various studios before he gained a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in 1943. The best of those early films are the thriller "Fly by Night" in 1942, with Richard Carlson and Nancy Kelly, and in 1943 the touching weepie "Someone to Remember," with Mable Paige in a signature role. As house director, his services were often used to salvage troublesome productions at the studio. On Mark Hellinger's production "Swell Guy" (1946), for instance, Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on "The Killers." Siodmak worked steadily while under contract, overshadowed by high profile directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, with whom he had been often compared by the press.

At Universal, Siodmak made yet another B-film, "Son of Dracula"(1943), the third and best in a trilogy of Dracula movies (based on his brother Curt's original story). His second feature, and first A-film, was the Maria Montez/Jon Hall vehicle, "Cobra Woman" (1944), made in garish Technicolor (Montez's cobra dance alone is worth the price of admission).

His first all-out noir was "Phantom Lady" (1944), for staff producer Joan Harrison, Universal's first female executive and Alfred Hitchcock's former secretary and script assistant. A classic, however flawed, it showcased Siodmak's skill with camera and editing to dazzling effect, but no more so than in the iconic jam-session sequence with Elisha Cook Jr. in throes on the drums. Following the critical success of "Phantom Lady," Siodmak directed "Christmas Holiday" (1944) with Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly (Hans J. Salter received an Oscar nomination for best music). Beginning with this film, his work in Hollywood attained the stylistic and thematic characteristics that are evident in his later noirs. "Christmas Holiday," adapted from a W. Somerset Maugham novel by Herman J. Mankiewicz, was Durbin's most successful feature, which she considered her only good film (and that Mankiewicz said was among his work in the 40s of which he was most proud). Siodmak's use of black-and-white cinematography and urban landscapes, together with his light-and-shadow designs, formed the basic structure of classic noir films. In fact, he often collaborated with cinematographers, such as Nicholas Musuraca, Elwood Bredell, and Franz Planer, to achieve in his films the Expressionist look he had cultivated in his early years at UFA (for "Christmas Holiday," he instructed Bredell in the use of deep-focus photography, which Gregg Toland had perfected for "Citizen Kane"). During Siodmak's tenure, Universal made the most of the noir style in "The Suspect," "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry" and "The Dark Mirror," but the capstone was "The Killers" in 1946, Burt Lancaster's film debut and Ava Gardner's first dramatic, featured role. A critical and financial success, it earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination for direction in Hollywood (his German production "The Devil Strikes at Night" ("Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam"), based on the true story of serial killer Bruno Lüdke, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957). While still under contract at Universal, Siodmak worked on loan out to RKO for the thriller "The Spiral Staircase," which he edited freely, without taking screen credit. For 20th Century Fox and producer Darryl F. Zanuck, he directed, partly on location in New York City, the crime noir "Cry of the City" in 1948, and in 1949 for MGM he tackled its lux production "The Great Sinner," but the prolix script proved unmanageable for Siodmak who relinquished direction to the dependable and bland Mervyn LeRoy. On loan out to Paramount in 1949, he made for producer Hal B. Wallis his penultimate American noir "The File on Thelma Jordan," with Barbara Stanwyck at her most fatal--and sympathetic. That she can be both is owed entirely to Siodmak who saw in this film a thematic link with "The Suspect" and "The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry," with the failed lovers of these films and significantly their tragic conclusions (ten years later he addressed the same theme in "The Rough and the Smooth"). Perhaps his finest American noir--although not his last--is "Criss Cross" that was to reunite him not only with Lancaster, but also "The Killers" producer Mark Hellinger, who died suddenly before production began in 1949. Working without the hands-on control of Hellinger again, Siodmak was able to make this film his own as he could not the earlier film. Yvonne De Carlo's working-class femme fatal (a high mark in her career) completes the deadly triangle, along with Lancaster and Dan Duryea: the archetype of doomed attraction central to all Siodmak's noirs, but the one he could fully express to its nihilistic conclusion.

Siodmak immersed himself in the creative process and genuinely loved working with actors; in fact, he was considered an actor's director, discovering Burt Lancaster, Ernest Borgnine, Tony Curtis, Debra Paget, Maria Schell, Mario Adorf, and skillfully directing actresses, such as Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy McGuire, Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines.[1]

He directed Charles Laughton (a close friend) and George Sanders, actors with indelible personas, and got from both perhaps the unlikeliest, most natural and under-played performances of their careers. He managed with Lancaster to capture a youthful vulnerability--despite the actor's age (he was 33)--that, watching him in "The Killers," surprises us even today. He accomplished the impossible and got a believable, dramatic performance from Gene Kelly who never before or since looked so (intentionally) frightening on screen. But above all, it must be acknowledged, he made audiences sit up and notice Ava Gardner and her potential to ruin men.

Before leaving Hollywood for Europe in 1952, following the problematic production "The Crimson Pirate" for Warner Bros. and producer Harold Hecht, his third and last film with Burt Lancaster (Siodmak dubbed the chaotic experience "The Hecht Follies"), Siodmak had directed some of the era's best films noirs (twelve in all), more than any other director who worked in that style. However, his identification with film noir, generally unpopular with American audiences, may have been more of a curse than a blessing.

He often expressed his desire to make pictures "of a different type and background" than the ones he had been making for ten years. Nevertheless, he ended his Universal contract with one last noir, the disappointing "Deported" (1951) which he filmed partly abroad (Siodmak was among the first refugee directors to return to Europe after making American films). The story is loosely based on the deportation of gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Siodmak had hoped Loretta Young would star, but settled for the Swedish actress Marta Toren.

Those "different type" of films he had made--"The Great Sinner" (1949) for MGM, "Time Out of Mind" (1947) for Universal (which Siodmak also produced), "The Whistle at Eaton Falls" (1951) for Columbia Pictures (Ernest Borgnine's debut and Dorothy Gish's return to the screen)--all proved ill-suited to his noir sensibilities (although in 1952 "The Crimson Pirate," despite the difficult production, was a surprising and pleasing departure--in fact, Lancaster believed it was inspiration for the tongue-in-cheek style of the James Bond films).

The five months he collaborated with Budd Schulberg on a screenplay tentatively titled "A Stone in the River Hudson," an early version of "On the Waterfront," was also a major disappointment for Siodmak. In 1954 he sued producer Sam Spiegel for copyright infringement. Siodmak was awarded $100,000, but no screen credit. His contribution to the original screenplay has never been acknowledged.

Siodmak's return to Europe in 1954 with a Grand Prize nomination at the Cannes Film Festival for his remake of Jacques Feyder's "Le grand jeu" proved a misstep, despite its stars, Gina Lollobrigida (two of them) and Arletty in the role originated by Françoise Rosay, Feyder's wife. In 1955, Siodmak returned to the Federal Republic of Germany to make "Die Ratten," with Maria Schell and Curd Jurgens, winning the Golden Berlin Bear at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival. It was the first in a series of films critical of his homeland, during and after Hitler, which included the remarkable "Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam," both thriller and social artifact of Germany under Nazi rule, shot in documentary style reminiscent of "Menschen am Sontag" and "Whistle at Eaton Falls," and in 1960, "Mein Schulfreund," an absurdist comedy, dark and strange, with Heinz Ruhmann as a postal worker attempting to reunite with childhood friend Hermann Goering. Between these films, and "Mein Vater, der Schauspieler" in 1956, with O. W. Fischer (the German Rock Hudson), he took a detour into Douglas Sirk territory with the sordid melodrama, "Dorothea Angermann" in 1959, featuring Germany's star Ruth Leuwerik. Later the same year he left Germany for Great Britain to film "The Rough and the Smooth," with Nadja Tiller and Tony Britton, yet another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America (compare its downbeat ending with that of "The File on Thelma Jordan"). He followed with "Katia" also in 1959, a tale of Czarist Russia, with twenty-one-year-old Romy Schneider, mistakenly titled in America "The Magnificent Sinner," recalling--unfavorably--Siodmak's other costume melodrama. In 1961, "L'affaire Nina B," with Pierre Brasseur and Nadja Tiller (again), returned Siodmak to familiar ground in a slick, black-and-white thriller about a pay-for-hire Nazi hunter, which could be argued was the start of the many spy themed films so popular in the 1960s. In 1962, the entertaining "Escape from East Berlin," with Don Murray and Christine Kaufman, had all the characteristic style of a Siodmak thriller, but was one that he later dismissed as something he had made for "little kids in America." His work in Germany returned to programmers like those that had begun his career in Hollywood 23 years earlier. From 1964-1965, he made a series of films with former Tarzan Lex Barker: "Der Schut," "Der Schatz der Azteken," and "Die Pyramide des Sonnengottes," all taken from the western, adventure novels of Karl May and made for little kids in both Germany and America.

His return to Hollywood film-making in 1967 to make the wide-screen western "Custer of the West" was another disappointment (it had been a project originally intended for Akira Kurosawa). With Robert Shaw in the title role and his wife Mary Ure as Mrs. Custer, it is the oddest of the Custer film biographies, yet interesting in its contemporary portrayal of Custer's anti-social individualism.

He ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, "Kampf um Rom" (1968), a more campy work (perhaps intentionally) than "Cobra Woman" had been. There was a brief and profitable foray into television in Great Britain with the series "O.S.S." (1957-58). Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971. He died alone in 1973 in Locarno, seven weeks after his wife's death.

The British Film Institute ran a retrospective of his career in April and May of 2015.

Hungarian-born S.Z. Sakall was a veteran of German, Hungarian and British films when he left Europe because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. In Hollywood from shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Sakall began appearing in comedies and musicals, often playing a lovable if somewhat excitable and/or befuddled uncle, businessman or neighborhood eccentric. Memorable as the waiter in Casablanca (1942) and as a somewhat lecherous Broadway producer in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). He retired from films in 1954 and died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1955.

Elisabeth Bergner was the daughter of the merchant Emil Ettel and his wife Anna Rosa Wagner. She grew up in Vienna, and she made her theatre debut in Innsbruck in 1915. In 1916 she obtained a contract in Zürich, where she played Ophelia next to the famous Alexander Moissi, who fell in love with her. The next stage in her career was Vienna, where she posed as a model for the talented but deeply unhappy sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. He fell in love with her, but she rejected him; his suicide soon afterwards shocked her. After performing in Vienna and Munich she came to Berlin in 1921. There she played in productions by Max Reinhardt and became a very popular actress.

During her early years as an actress, she was often helped by the poet and critic Albert Ehrenstein, whom she called Xaverl. Ehrenstein was also in love with her. At one time she promised him a child but changed her mind. Ehrenstein wrote numerous poems for her, but often she kept him at a distance. However, their friendship lasted and they continued to exchange letters.

She made her film debut in Der Evangelimann (1924). In 1924, director Paul Czinner gave her a part in Husbands or Lovers (1924). This was the beginning of their successful professional collaboration as well as their personal relationship. Her most successful silent movie was Fräulein Else (1929).

Bergner and Czinner were both Jews, and after the Nazis came to power, they emigrated to Vienna and then London, where they were married. She learned English and was able to continue her career. In London, she became friendly with G.B. Shaw and J.M. Barrie, who after a long hiatus from writing drafted a play for her; the result, The Boy David (1936), unfortunately was not successful. She also appeared as Gemma Jones in the movie version of Escape Me Never (1935) by Margaret Kennedy, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Her movie The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934) was forbidden in Germany.

During her London years, she sent much of her money to relatives and friends in need, among them Ehrenstein. Bergner's only Hollywood movie, Paris Calling (1941), failed to attract attention. On Broadway, she fared better and was very successful in The Two Mrs. Carrolls. While appearing in it, she encountered a young aspiring actress who stood in the alley outside the theater every night and claimed to have seen every performance; Bergner befriended and later hired her but broke with her after the young actress -- who called herself Martina Lawrence, the name of one of Bergner's twin characters in Stolen Life (1939) -- became over-interested in all aspects of Bergner's life. Bergner later recounted this story to her friend Mary Orr, a writer, who turned it into the short story "The Wisdom of Eve" -- which was the basis for the movie All About Eve (1950).

After the war, Bergner worked in New York for a few years; in 1950, she returned to England. She gave acclaimed Bible readings in Israel in English, German and Hebrew. In Germany, she resumed her stage career, and in 1959 she stunned audiences and critics in Berlin with her performance in Geliebter Lügner, a German version of Jerome Kilty's Dear Liar, a play based on the letters exchanged between G.B. Shaw and actress Stella Campbell. In 1961, she returned to the movies, and in 1970 she made her directorial debut. Her last stage appearance took place in 1973 (Her husband had died in 1972).

In 1978, a volume of her memoirs was published, in which she shared some of her secrets with the public, such as Lehmbruck's obsession with her. In 1979 she received the Ernst Lubitsch Prize and in 1982 the Eleonora Duse Prize. She discussed a possible return to Vienna with Bruno Kreisky, but she died from cancer at her home in London in 1986. In Seglitz (Berlin), a city park was named after her.

With his lanky frame, big nose, toothbrush moustache and horn-rimmed glasses he looked like someone had decided to cross Groucho Marx with Albert Einstein. The perennial scene-stealer Felix Bressart had two distinct careers as a comic actor: an earlier one, on stage and screen in his native Germany, and a later -- even more prosperous one -- in Hollywood. Trained under Maria Moissi in Berlin, Felix began acting professionally after World War I. He honed his skills in the genres of political parody, musical comedy and slapstick farce in the theatres of Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (with Max Reinhardt). By 1933, he had established his film acting credentials in popular mainstream movies like Three from the Filling Station (1930) and Die Privatsekretärin (1931). Like so many other distinguished actors he was forced to leave the German realm after the Nazis took power in 1933. Felix moved via Switzerland and France to a new domicile in the United States where his connections to fellow émigrés like Joe Pasternak and Ernst Lubitsch guaranteed him rapid and steady employment.

In Hollywood, Felix joined the regular company of stock players at MGM. He was immediately typecast, his stock-in-trade being disheveled academics, wistful European philosophers, scientists and music professors of diverse ethnicity. His first major screen success was as one of the Russian commissars in Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), a delightful performance which spawned as similar part being created for him in Comrade X (1940). The role which ultimately defined his career, in equal parts comedy and pathos, was in the classic wartime satire To Be or Not to Be (1942), as Greenberg, a Jewish member of an acting troupe with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. It seemed, that Felix was still underemployed in films, since he managed to practise as a doctor of medicine on the side. Sadly, he died of leukemia in 1949 at the untimely age of 57.

The son of an out-of-work bookkeeper, Pasternak arrived in the U.S. from Hungary in 1921. After working in a belt factory in Philadelphia, he moved to New York where he plucked chickens and worked in a cafeteria. Becoming increasingly infatuated with the film business, it didn't take him long to find a job at the Long Island Paramount studio as a busboy and washing dishes in the commissary for 15 $ a week. His easy manner earned him the sobriquet 'Smiling Joe' and he was invited to do a screen test, which went rather badly. As acting seemed out of the question, one of Paramount's directors took pity on the young man and gave him a tryout as fourth assistant. By 1923, Joe had advanced to second assistant and was regularly associated with the films of his protégé, Allan Dwan. When Paramount closed their Long Island facility, Joe made the trip to Hollywood, but found work scarce. However, his effort as director of a low budget two-reel comedy was noticed by the director Wesley Ruggles, who promptly engaged him as his assistant at Universal studios. In 1926, he was packed off to Europe to act as talent scout and, after another two years, was offered the position of manager of their European operation, Deutsche Universal-Film AG, based in Berlin.

From 1929, Joe also worked as producer of a string of German, Austrian and Hungarian light entertainments, a mixture of musicals, comedies and romances. In 1935, Universal, in dire financial straits, wound down their European unit and a new management recalled Joe to Hollywood. Within a year, he managed to almost single-handedly save the studio from bankruptcy through his canny promotion of charismatic teenage singing sensation Deanna Durbin (a recent acquisition from MGM) to star status. At the same time, he imported several fellow Hungarian émigrés into Hollywood, notably his close friend, the talented director Henry Koster, and his brother-in-law, the character actor S.Z. Sakall, who was to become fondly known as 'Cuddles'. Assigning direction to Koster, Joe produced the hugely successful box office hit Three Smart Girls (1936), followed by nine more musical outings in a similar vein, which brought fame and fortune to both Deanna and Joe, and put Universal financially in the pink. Joe stuck to the same formula (wholesome , Cinderella-type stories with polished musical interludes) on every occasion, using a tried-and-tested crew of writers and directors - all musical comedy experts - including Koster, Norman Krasna, Edward Ludwig and Norman Taurog. After launching the career of another talented juvenile soprano named Gloria Jean, Joe proceeded to revive the flagging fortunes of former Paramount star Marlene Dietrich, remodelling her image into one that was more approachable to a general audience. He effectively recast her original 'Blue Angel' bar room singer as wisecracking, good-hearted saloon girl Frenchy in Destry Rides Again (1939), a gently self-mocking western, which turned out to be one of the biggest hits for Universal in 1939.

In 1941, now firmly ensconced in Hollywood as the 'king of musicals', Joe made the natural progression by joining MGM, the organisation most adept at this particular genre. While Arthur Freed headed the A-team, Joe was assigned the second string production unit at MGM, which handled operettas and light musical entertainments. During his tenure, Joe became protégé to Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell and helped to make swimming talent Esther Williams into a bankable movie star. He had huge successes with operatic films, like Mario Lanza's The Great Caruso (1951) and The Merry Widow (1952). He also handled some lavish, big budget extravaganzas, including Thousands Cheer (1943), Anchors Aweigh (1945) and the compelling, though fictionalised, story of Ruth Etting, Love Me or Leave Me (1955). Joe rounded off his career with a trio of Elvis Presley musicals and produced the 1966 Academy Award ceremonies (the first to be filmed in colour), at which one of the most honoured films was the David Lean-directed epic Doctor Zhivago (1965) - which just happened to have been authored by Joe's distant relative Boris Pasternak. Joe retired in 1968 with an impressive one hundred production credits to his name, and died in Hollywood in September 1991 at the age of 89.

Luise Rainer, the first thespian to win back-to-back Oscars, was born on January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. Her parents were Emilie (Königsberger) and Heinrich Rainer, a businessman. She took to the stage, and plied her craft on the boards in Germany. As a young actress, she was discovered by the legendary theater director Max Reinhardt and became part of his company in Vienna, Austria. "I was supposed to be very gifted, and he heard about me. He wanted me to be part of his theater," Rainer recounted in a 1997 interview. She joined Reinhardt's theatrical company in Vienna and spent years developing as an actress under his tutelage. As part of Reinhardt's company, Rainer became a popular stage actress in Berlin and Vienna in the early 1930s. Rainer was a natural talent for Reinhardt's type of staging, which required an impressionistic acting style.

Rainer, who made her screen debut as a teenager and appeared in three other German-language films in the early 1930s, terminated her European career when the Austrian Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Germany. With his vicious anti-Semitism bringing about the Draconian Nuremberg Laws severely curtailing the rights of Germany's Jews, and efforts to expand that regime into the Sudetenland and Austria, Hitler and his Nazi government was proving a looming threat to European Jewry. Rainer had been spotted by a talent scout, who offered her a seven-year contract with the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The 25-year-old Rainer took the deal and emigrated to the United States.

She made her American debut in the movie Escapade (1935), replacing Myrna Loy, who was originally slated for the part. It was her luck to have William Powell as her co-star in her first Hollywood film, as he mentored her, teaching her how to act in front of the camera. Powell, whom Rainer remembers as "a dear man" and "a very fine person," lobbied MGM. boss Louis B. Mayer, reportedly telling him, "You've got to star this girl, or I'll look like an idiot."

During the making of "Escapade", Rainer met, and fell in love with, the left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, then at the height of his fame. They were married in 1937. It was not a happy union. MGM cast Rainer in support of Powell in the title role of the The Great Ziegfeld (1936), its spectacular bio-epic featuring musical numbers that recreated his "Follies" shows on Broadway. As Anna Held, Ziegfeld's common-law wife, Rainer excelled in the musical numbers, but it is for her telephone scene that she is most remembered. "The Great Ziegfeld" was a big hit and went on to win the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1936. Rainer received her first of two successive Best Actress Oscars for playing Held. The award was highly controversial at the time as she was a relative unknown and it was only her first nomination, but also because her role was so short and relatively minor that it better qualified for a supporting nomination. (While 1936 was the first year that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored supporting players, her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, listed her as a lead player, then got out its block vote for her.) Compounding the controversy was the fact that Rainer beat out such better known and more respected actresses as Carole Lombard (her sole Oscar nomination) in My Man Godfrey (1936), previous Best Actress winner Norma Shearer (her fifth nomination) in Romeo and Juliet (1936), and Irene Dunne (her second of five unsuccessful nominations) in Theodora Goes Wild (1936). Some of the bitchery was directed toward Louis B. Mayer, whom non-MGM Academy members resented for his ability to manipulate Academy votes. Other critics of her first Oscar win claimed it was the result of voters being unduly impressed with the great budget ($2 million) of "The Great Ziegfeld" rather than great acting. Most observers agree that Rainer won her Oscar as the result of her moving and poignant performance in just one single scene in the picture, the famous telephone scene in which the broken-hearted Held congratulates Ziegfeld over the telephone on his upcoming marriage to Billie Burke while trying to retain her composure and her dignity. During the scene, the camera is entirely focused on Rainer, and she delivers a tour-de-force performance. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most famous scenes in movie history. With another actress playing Held, the scene could have been mawkish, but Rainer brought the pathos of the scene out and onto film. She based her interpretation of the scene on Jean Cocteau's play "La Voix Humaine". "Cocteau's play is just a telephone conversation about a woman who has lost her beloved to another woman", Rainer remembered. "That is the comparison. As it fit into the Ziegfeld story, that's how I wrote it. It's a daily happening, not just in Cocteau." In an interview held 60 years after the film's release, Rainer was dismissive of the performance. "I was never proud of anything", she said. "I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that."

Rainer would allay any back-biting from Hollywood's bovines over her first Oscar with her performance as O-Lan in MGM producer Irving Thalberg's spectacular adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth", the former Boy Wonder's final picture before his untimely death. The role won Rainer her second Best Actress Award. The success of The Good Earth (1937) was rooted in its realism, and its realism was enhanced by Rainer's acting opposite the legendary Paul Muni as her husband. When Thalberg cast Muni in the role of Wang Lung, he had to abandon any thought of casting the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as O-Lan as the Hays Office would not allow the hint of miscegenation, even between an actual Chinese woman and a Caucuasian actor in yellow-face drag. So, Thalberg gave Rainer the part, and she made O-Lan her own. She refused to wear a heavy makeup, and her elfin look helped her to assay a Chinese woman with results far superior to those of Myrna Loy in her Oriental vamp phase or Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed (1944). In the late 1990s, Rainer praised her director, Sidney Franklin, as "wonderful", and explained that she used an acting technique similar to "The Method" being pioneered by her husband's Group Theatre comrades back in New York. "I worked from inside out", she said. "It's not for me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me do it." The win made Rainer the first two-time Oscar winner in an acting category and the first to win consecutive acting awards (Spencer Tracy, her distaff honoree for Captains Courageous (1937) would follow her as a consecutive acting Oscar winner the next year, and Walter Brennan, Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for Come and Get It (1936) the year Rainer won her first, would tie them both in 1937 with his win for Kentucky (1938) and trump them with his third win for The Westerner (1940), a record subsequently tied by Ingrid Bergman, Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and surpassed by Katharine Hepburn.)

Rainer's career soon went into free-fall and collapsed, as she became the first notable victim of the "Oscar curse", the phenomenon that has seem many a performer's career take a nose-dive after winning an Academy Award. "For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me", Rainer said. A non-conformist, Rainer rejected Hollywood's values of Hollywood. In the late 1990s, she said, "I came from Europe where I was with a wonderful theater group, and I worked. The only thing on my mind was to do good work. I didn't know what an Academy Award was." MGM boss Mayer, the founding force behind the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, had to force her to attend the Awards banquet to receive her Oscar. She rebelled against the studio due to the movies that MGM forced her into after "The Good Earth".

In one case, director Dorothy Arzner had been assigned by MGM producer Joseph M. Mankiewicz (whose wife, Rose Stradner had been Rainer's understudy in the Vienna State Theater) in 1937 to direct Rainer in "The Girl from Trieste", an unproduced Ferenc Molnár play about a prostitute trying to go reform herself who discovers the hypocrisies of the respectable class which she aspires to. After Thalberg's death in 1936, Mayer's lighter aesthetic began to rule the roost at MGM. Mayer genuinely believed in the goodness of women and motherhood and put women on a pedestal; he once told screenwriter Frances Marion that he never wanted to see anything produced by MGM that would embarrass his wife and two daughters.

Without the more sophisticated Thalberg at the studio to run interference, Molnar's play was rewritten so that it was no longer about a prostitute, but a slightly bitter Cinderella story with a happy ending. Retitled by Mankiewicz as The Bride Wore Red (1937), Rainer withdrew and was replaced by Joan Crawford. In a 1976 interview in "The New York Times", Arzner claimed that Rainer "had been suspended for marrying a Communist" (Clifford Odets). This is unlikely as MGM, like all Hollywood studios, had known or suspected communists on its payroll, most of whose affiliations were known by MGM vice president E.J. Mannix. (Mannix, one of whose functions was responsibility for security at the studio, once said it would have been impossible to fire them all, as "the communists" were the studio's best writers.) The studio never took action against alleged communists until an industry-wide agreement to do so was sealed at the Waldorf Conference of 1947, which was held in reaction to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launching a Hollywood witch hunt.

It was more likely that Rainer, fussy over her projects and wanting to use her Academy Award prominence to ensure herself better roles, withdrew on her own due to her lack of enthusiasm for the reformulated product. In the late 1990s, Rainer recalled the satisfaction of being a European stage actress. "One day we were on a big tour", she told an interviewer in the late 1990s. "We did a play by Pirandello, and Reinhardt was in the theater. I shall never forget, it was the greatest compliment I ever got, better than any Academy Award. He came to me, looked at me and said - we were never called by first names - 'Rainer, how did you do this?' It was so wonderful. 'How did you create this?' I was so startled and happy. That was my Academy Award." Rainer still is dismissive of the Academy Awards. "I can't watch the Oscars," she said. "Everybody thanking their mother, their father, their grandparents, their nurse - it's a crazy, horrible." She blames the studio and Mayer for the rapid decline in her career. "What they did with me upset me very much", she said in a 1997 interview. "I was dreaming naturally like anyone to do something very good, but after I got the two Academy Awards the studio thought, it doesn't matter what she gets. They threw all kinds of stuff on me, and I thought, no, I didn't want to be an actress."

Mayer pulled his famous emotional routines when Rainer, whom he wanted to turn into a glamorous star, would demand meatier roles. "He would cry phony tears", she recalled. Mayer had opposed her being cast as O-Lan in "The Good Earth", but Thalberg, who had a connection with MGM capo di tutti capi Nicholas Schenck, the president of MGM corporate parent Loew's, Inc., appealed to Schenck, who overrode Mayer's veto. (Mayer, who was involved in a power struggle with Thalberg before the latter's death, had opposed his filming Pearl Buck's novel. Mayer's reasoning was that American audiences wouldn't patronize movies about American farmers, so what made anyone think they'd flock to see a film about Chinese farmers, especially one with such a big budget, estimated at $2.8 million. (Upon release, the film barely broke even.) Thalberg died during the filming of "The Good Earth" (the only film of his released by MGM whose title credits bore his name, in the form of a posthumous tribute).

Rainer felt lost without her protector. She recalled that Mayer "didn't know what to do with me, and that made me so unhappy. I was on the stage with great artists, and everything was so wonderful. I was in a repertory theater, and every night I played something else." Rainer asked to play Nora in a film of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" or portray Madame Curie, but instead, Mayer - now in complete control of the studio - had her cast in The Toy Wife (1938), a movie she actually wound up liking, as she was charmed by her co-star, the urbane, intellectually and politically enlightened Melvyn Douglas. She recalls Douglas, ultimately a double-Oscar winner like herself, as her favorite leading man. "He was intelligent, and he was interested also in other things than acting."

Her problems with the culture of Hollywood, or the lack thereof, were worsening. The lack of intellectual conversation or concern with ideas by the denizens of the movie colony she was forced to work with was depressing. Hollywood was an unsophisticated place where materialism, such as the stars' preoccupation with clothes, was paramount. As she tells it, "Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was at a luncheon with Robert Taylor sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what do you want to do', and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I practically fell under the table."

MGM teamed her with fellow Oscar-winner Tracy in Big City (1937), a movie about conflict between rival taxi drivers. The memory of the movie disgusted her. "Supposedly it wasn't a bad film, but I thought it was a bad film!" She was also cast in The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937), reteaming her with "Ziegfeld" co-star Powell, a movie she didn't like, as she couldn't understand its story. A detective tale, the script thoroughly confused Rainer, who was expected to soldier on like a good employee. Instead, she resisted.

After appearing in The Great Waltz (1938) and Dramatic School (1938), her career was virtually over by 1938. She never made another film for MGM. "I just had to get away", she said about Hollywood. "I couldn't bear this total concentration and interviews on oneself, oneself, oneself. I wanted to learn, and to live, to go all over the world, to learn by seeing things and experiencing things, and Hollywood seemed very narrow." When World War II broke out in Europe, Rainer was joined by her family, as her German-born father was also an American citizen, allowing them all to escape Hitler and the Holocaust. Even before the outbreak of war, Rainer had been very worried about the state of affairs of the world, and she could not abide the escapist trifles that MGM wanted to cast her in. When she protested, Mayer told Rainer that if she defied him, he would blackball her in Hollywood.

Disturbed by Hollywood's apathy over fascism in Europe and Asia and by labor unrest and poverty in the U.S., she decided to walk out on her contract. She and Odets returned to New York. They were divorced in 1940. "Hollywood was a very strange place", she remembered. "To me, it was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging." Her frustration with Hollywood was so complete, she abandoned movie acting in the early 1940s, after making the World War II drama Hostages (1943) for Paramount.

She made her Broadway debut in the play "A Kiss for Cinderella", which was staged by Lee Strasberg, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on March 10, 1942 and closed April 18th after 48 performances. Rainer then worked for the war effort during World War II, appearing at war bond rallies. She went on a tour of North Africa and Italy for the Army Special Service, socializing with soldiers to build their morale, and supplying them with books. The experience changed her life, allowing her to get over the shyness she'd had all her life. It also broadened her experience, forcing her to deal with the obvious fact that there were more important things than movie acting, which had proven unfulfilling to her.

Fortunately, Rainer found happiness in a long-lived marriage with the publisher Robert Knittel, a wealthy man whom she married in 1945. The couple had a daughter and made their home mostly in Switzerland and England as Rainer essentially left acting behind, although she did do some television in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Her retirement from the movies lasted for 53 years, until her brief comeback in The Gambler (1997), a movie based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's eponymous story. In the film, Rainer played the role of the matriarch of an aristocratic Russian family in the 1860s who is in hock due to the family members' obsession with gambling.

Toward the end of her life, Rainer lived in a luxurious flat in Eaton Square in London's Belgravia district, in a building where Vivien Leigh once lived. Blessed with a good memory, she claimed she could not remember the 1937 Academy Awards ceremony, when she won her first Oscar. She says the glamour of the event was out of sync with her life at the time, which was one of great sadness. "I married Clifford Odets. The marriage was for both of us a failure. He wanted me to be his little wife and a great actress at the same time. Somehow I could not live up to all of that."

She had intriguing offers during her long retirement. Federico Fellini had wanted Rainer for a role in La Dolce Vita (1960), but though she admired the director, she didn't like the script and turned it down. Rainer occasionally plied her craft as an actress on the stage. She made one more stab at Broadway, appearing in a 1950 production of Ibsen's "The Lady from the Sea", which was staged by Sam Wanamaker and Terese Hayden and co-starred Steven Hill, one of the founding members of Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. The play was a flop, running just 16 performances. "I was living in America and was on the stage there - sporadically. I always lived more than I worked. Which doesn't mean that I do not love my profession, and every moment I was in it gave me great satisfaction and happiness."

Rainer had no regrets over not becoming the star she might have been. She outlived all of the legendary stars of her era, which likely is the best revenge for the loss of her career after bidding adieu to a company town she could not abide.

Kurt Weill was born on 2 March 1900 in Dessau, Germany. He was a composer and writer, known for Three Penny Opera (1963), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). He was married to Lotte Lenya. He died on 3 April 1950 in New York City, New York, USA.

Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer. While best remembered in the U.S. for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963), she is celebrated in Germany for her ground-breaking performances in the plays of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and her recordings of songs from those works.

She was born Karoline Wilhelmine Charlotte Blaumauer on October 18, 1898, in Vienna, Austria (at that time Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a working class family. Young Lenya was fond of dancing. In 1914 she moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There she began using her stage name, Lotte Lenya. In Swizerland she studied classical dance, singing and acting and made her stage debut at the Schauspielhaus. In 1921 she moved to Berlin and blended in the city's cosmopolitan cultural milieu. In 1924 she met composer Kurt Weill, and they married in 1926. She performed in several productions of 'The Threepenny Opera', which became an important step in her acting career.

In 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, Lotte Lenya escaped from the country. At the same time, being stressed by the circumstances of life, she divorced from Kurt Weil, to be reunited with him two years later. In 1935 both emigrated to the United States and remarried in 1937. After Kurt Weill's death, she dedicated her efforts to keeping Weill's music played in numerous productions worldwide. In 1957 she won a Tony award for her role as Jenny, performed in English, in a Broadway production of 'The Threepenny Opera'.

Lotte Lenya shot to international fame with her portrayal of Contessa Magda Terbilli-Gozales, Vivien Leigh's friend in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). The role brought Lenya an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress. She gained additional fame after she appeared as Rosa Klebb, former head of operations for SMERSH/KGB, and now a sadistic Spectre agent with poisonous knife in her shoe, in From Russia with Love (1963). She died of cancer on November 27, 1981, in New York. She is entombed with Kurt Weill in a mausoleum, in Mount Repose Cemetery, in Haverstraw, New York, USA.

Franz Waxman (Wachsmann) pursued his dream of a career in music despite his family's misgivings. He worked for several years as a bank teller and paid for piano, harmony and composition lessons with his salary. He later moved to Berlin, where he continued his study and progress as a musician. He was able to support himself by playing and arranging for a popular German jazz band, Weintraub Syncopaters, in the late 1920s. Friedrich Hollaender, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first chance to move into movie scoring by hiring him to orchestrate and conduct Hollander's score (an arrangement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) for the film that launched Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. During 1932 Waxman, a Jew, joined many other Jews leaving Germany as the Nazi vise closed irrevocably on free society. He continued working with Germanfilm makers in France. Waxman did musical arranging and co-scoring, usually with Allan Gray, for approximately 15 European movies (his first independent score was in 1932). "The Blue Angel" producer Erich Pommer liked Waxman's work and offered him the composing job for Liliom (1934), directed by Fritz Lang in France.

Pommer decided to do Music in the Air (1934), a Jerome Kern musical, which meant going to Hollywood. Waxman was asked to come along to do the arranging. Needing no further reason to remain in Europe as the Nazi clouds darkened over it, Waxman began a new chapter in Hollywood film music history. He fortunately had some spare time to study with 'Arnold Schoenberg' after coming to Los Angeles, but he was soon talking to another new arrival, English director James Whale, about scoring Bride of Frankenstein (1935) for Universal. Waxman gave Whale what he wanted--an unusual score to fit the quirky, somewhat over-the-top content of the film (in fact, some of this score was later used in other films). As Waxman worked for Universal through the 1930s, he found himself in assembly-line mode, sometimes sharing scoring credit, and doing a lot of arranging stock music, which was usually used for the studio's many serials. This cranked up Waxman's yearly film output to around 20 or so through 1940.

By 1940, however, he was composing original music scores for other studios, beginning with the romantic music for Selznick Studios' Rebecca (1940)--the first Hollywood film for Alfred Hitchcock--and whimsical fare for MGM's The Philadelphia Story (1940). In 1941 he was doing more work for MGM with Honky Tonk (1941) and his second Hitchcock score, Suspicion (1941) from RKO. By 1943 and for the rest of the decade Waxman was usually scoring for Warner Bros., starting with Destination Tokyo (1943) and including music for some of that studio's classics of the period, such as To Have and Have Not (1944) with Humphrey Bogart. Through the decade he was nominated for an Oscar seven times for Best Film Score.

Waxman moved on to Paramount through the first half of the 1950s and garnered his two Oscars in back--to-back wins for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). This recognition finally underscored what was at the heart of all of Waxman's music: seriously focused attention on relaying a film's story through the content of the music. He would continue his scoring work for several studios into the 1960s, with three more nominations. Some of his music in the 1950s was recycled from his previous scores, as in the case of his third assignment for Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954) which contained used music. Waxman was also active in contemporary classical music. In 1947 he founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival and, as Music Director and Conductor, brought the premieres of works by world renowned contemporary composers to the Los Angeles cultural scene. Among his own output of such music was his popular "Carmen Fantasy" for violin and orchestra. Waxman also composed for TV's Gunsmoke (1955), The Fugitive (1963), Peyton Place (1964) (he had composed the music for the film the series was based on, Peyton Place (1957)) and others. Waxman died relatively young, but because of his steady output, only fellow emigrant Max Steiner (who was nearly 20 years older and whose output entailed more than 300 original scores) was a more prolific early Hollywood composer.

Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner Bros. and became thoroughly entrenched in the studio system. His films during the 1930s and '40s encompassed nearly every genre imaginable and some, including Casablanca (1942) and Mildred Pierce (1945), are considered to be film classics. His brilliance waned in the 1950s when he made a number of mediocre films for studios other than Warner. He directed his last film in 1961, a year before his death at 74.

From the day she was born Martha lived in a world of music. For sure her father was a banker but he was also an amateur pianist. As for her mother, she was a housewife but also a very talented opera singer who had given up her career for the joys of matrimony and motherhood. It does not come as a surprise, under such circumstances, that the little girl's singing capacities were soon discovered. At eight she was already on a scene singing an aria from "The Barber of Seville". A critic attended the show and was impressed by her performance. He introduced her to the director of the Magyar Theater, where she landed her first contract. As of the age of 10 she was hailed as Hungary's "national idol". And it was not long before her triumph became international. An operetta, "Pogasza", was written specially for the crystal-clear-voiced little singer. Among others, she played the role of the doll in "Tales of Hoffmann" and starred in "Das Veilchen vom Montmartre" by Kalman. With the advent of sound films, she found herself very much in demand in the 1930s, bringing her beautiful voice and looks to yet more delighted viewers. It is on the set of "Mein Herz ruft nach dir" that she met Jan Kiepura, another successful opera and operetta singer. Although it was not love at first sight, Jan and Martha gradually fell in love, married two years later, had two sons and were separated only by death with the demise of Jan in 1966. In 1938, the couple fled Austria after its annexation by Hitler and settled down in the South of France first then in the USA. Martha made fewer movies but kept on singing. For instance she co-starred in "The merry Widow" in Broadway for three years with Jan Kiepura. She became an American citizen in the fifties and currently lives in Rye, new York.

Eva Gabor was born on February 11, 1919 in Budapest, Hungary, to Jolie Gabor (née Janka Tilleman) and Vilmos Gabor (born Farkas Miklós Grün), a soldier. Her older siblings were Magda Gabor, an actress, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, an actress and socialite. Her parents were both from Jewish families. She went to Hollywood, California, to act in the 1930s. Her mother escaped from Nazi-occupied Budapest in the 1940s, also settling in the U.S.

Eva appeared both in films and on Broadway in the 1950s, as well as in several "A"-movies, including The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Artists and Models (1955), which featured Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

In 1953, she was given her own television talk show, The Eva Gabor Show (1953). Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, she appeared on television and in movies. She appeared on one episode of the mystery series Justice (1954), and was on the game show What's My Line? (1950) as the "mystery challenger". Her film appearances during this period include a remake of My Man Godfrey (1957), Gigi (1958) and It Started with a Kiss (1959).

However, she is best remembered as Lisa Douglas, the socialite turned farm wife on Green Acres (1965) with co-star Eddie Albert playing her attorney husband Oliver Wendell Douglas. Eva Gabor died at age 76 from respiratory failure and pneumonia on July 4, 1995 in Los Angeles, California.

Undoubtedly the woman who had come to epitomize what we recognize today as "celebrity," Zsa Zsa Gabor, is better known for her many marriages, personal appearances, her "dahlink" catchphrase, her actions, gossip, and quotations on men, rather than her film career.

Zsa Zsa was born as Sári Gabor on February 6, 1917 in Budapest, Hungary, to Jolie Gabor (née Janka Tilleman) and Vilmos Gabor (born Farkas Miklós Grün), both of Jewish descent. Her siblings were Eva Gabor and Magda Gabor. Zsa Zsa studied at a Swiss finishing school, was second runner-up in the fifth Miss Hungary pageant, and began her stage career in Vienna in 1934. In 1941, the year she obtained her first divorce, she followed younger sister Eva to Hollywood.

A radiant, beautiful blonde, Zsa Zsa began to appear on television series and occasional films. Her first film was at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Lovely to Look At (1952), co-starring Kathryn Grayson and Red Skelton. She next made a comedy called We're Not Married! (1952) at 20th Century Fox with Ginger Rogers. It was far from a star billing; she appeared several names down the cast as a supporting actress. But in 1952 she broke into films big time with her starring role opposite José Ferrer in Moulin Rouge (1952), although it has been said that throughout filming, director John Huston gave her a very difficult time.

In the following years, Zsa Zsa slipped back into supporting roles in films such as Lili (1953) and 3 Ring Circus (1954). Her main period of film work was in the 1950s, with other roles in Death of a Scoundrel (1956), with Yvonne De Carlo, and The Man Who Wouldn't Talk (1958) with Anna Neagle; again, these were supporting roles. By the 1960s, Zsa Zsa was appearing more as herself in films. She now appeared to follow her own persona around, and cameo appearances were the order of the day in films such as Pepe (1960) and Jack of Diamonds (1967). This continued throughout the 1970s.

She was memorable as herself in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), in which she humorously poked fun at a 1989 incident where she was convicted of slapping a police officer (Paul Kramer) during a traffic stop. She spent three days in jail and had to do 120 hours of community service. Such infamous incidents contributed to her becoming one of the most all-time recognizable of Hollywood celebrities, and sometimes ridiculed as a result. She was also memorable to British television viewers on The Ruby Wax Show (1997).

In 2002, Gabor was reported to be in a coma in a Los Angeles hospital after a horrifying car accident. The 85-year-old star was injured when the car she was traveling in hit a utility pole in West Hollywood, California. The reports about her coma eventually proved to be inaccurate.

Zsa Zsa's life, spanning two continents, nine husbands, and 11 decades, came to an end on December 18, 2016, when she died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles, California. She was 99.