Dorothea Wieck was born in Davos in 1908. She made her film debut in 1926 in German silent films. She came to international fame for her lead role in 1931 in “Madchen in Uniform”. In 1933 she went to Hollywood to make her only American film “Cradle Song”. She returned to Germany and pursued her career there. She died in Berlin in 1986.
IMDB entry:
After spending most of her childhood in Sweden, Dorothea was schooled in Dresden and at the age of 12, was taught dance by Maria Moissi in Berlin. She made her stage debut in Vienna , where she appeared in plays by Carl Zuckmayer and Ferenc Molnár. The Swiss-born made her debut in the silent cinema in 1926 after being spotted by the director Franz Seitz. Her greatest impact was to be in Leontine Sagan‘s pioneering feminist film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) in the leading role of the teacher Fraeulein von Bernburg.
On the strength of this performance, she was signed by Paramount to star in Cradle Song(1933). While her performance was poignant, the film flopped at the box office and her second Hollywood effort (Miss Fane’s Baby Is Stolen (1934), based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case) did even worse. This, combined with accusations of espionage, forced her return to Germany. Back home, she made no secret of her dislike of the Nazi regime and her career suffered as a result. Only a few roles in relatively minor films followed. After the war, she devoted most of her time to the theatre (with sporadic appearances on screen) and between 1961 and 1967 taught acting at her own academy in Berlin.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Claire Oberman was born in Holland in 1956 and raised in New Zealand. She first gained prominence for her role in the very popular “Tenko” a Second World War drama set in a prision camp for women in Malaya where she played the Australian nurse Kate Norris. Her films include “Goodbye Pork Pie” in 1991 and “The Patriot Games” the following year.
Vera Ralston was born in 1919 in Czechoslovakia. She was very famous as an ice skater before making films. She emigated to the U.S. in the early 1940’s. She married Herbert J. Yates the owner of Republic Studios and made over 25 films including “Fair Wind to Java”, “Storm Over Lisbon” and “Dakota”. Vera Ralston died in 2003.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary in “The Guardian”:
There were few Hollywood actors of the studio era who suffered from as many snide remarks as the Czech-born ice-skater-turned-star Vera Hruba Ralston, who has died aged 81. This was not only because her acting was rather wooden, and her accent thick, but because she was married to Herbert J Yates, the head of Republic Pictures, the man who foisted her on an unwilling public.
Her performance improved slightly from picture to picture, whether in thrillers, romances, westerns or costume dramas, but she was never a box-office attraction. Yates’s fixation was such that he forced exhibitors to run her films by threatening to withhold more popular Republic products from them; it was one of the reasons for the studio’s demise.
She first caught Yates’s attention in 1939 when she toured the US with a show called Ice Vanities. As Vera Hruba, she had won a silver medal at the 1937 Berlin Olympics; she had gone to America with her mother after the Nazis invaded Prague.
In 1941, Yates cast Vera – and the entire company of Ice-Capades – in a film of the same name, an inconsequential musical which revolved around skating numbers. This was followed by Ice-Capades Revue a year later. Then, in 1943, Yates signed Hruba to a long-term contract, adding Ralston to her name. Four years later, at 67, he left his wife and children for the 27-year-old, before marrying her in 1952. He had hoped that Ralston would rival Henie, at 20th Century Fox, billing her as a star who “skated out of Czechoslovakia into the hearts of America”. But after Lake Placid Serenade (1944), she was rarely seen on ice.
Her first real acting role was opposite Erich Von Stroheim and Richard Arlen in The Lady And The Monster (1944), all three of them appearing in Storm Over Lisbon the same year. Still in the B-movie category was Dakota (1945), in which Ralston waited patiently at home while husband John Wayne settled railroad disputes. She co-starred with Wayne again in The Fighting Kentuckian (1949).
Mainly, Ralston was confined to more than a dozen films made by Republic’s journeyman director Joseph Kane. According to Kane, “Vera could have made it rough on everyone, but she never took advantage of that situation. Although she never became a good actress, she was cooperative, hardworking and eager to please.”
Despite this, it was reported that Wayne threatened to leave the studio if forced to work with Ralston again, and Sterling Hayden was offered a bonus to appear opposite her in Timberjack (1955).
Kane directed Ralston in perhaps her best film, Fair Wind To Java (1953), a good adventure yarn with Fred MacMurray as a cynical captain, who falls for native girl Ralston while in search of south seas treasure. The fact that she had a Czech accent was not explained.
In 1956, two Republic stockholders filed a lawsuit against Yates for using company assets to promote his wife as a star, and giving her brother producer status at a salary far beyond his worth. Two years later, Yates had to relinquish his post, and Ralston retired. When he died in 1966, Yates left his wife half of his estate, valued at more than $10m. In 1973, she married businessman Charles DeAlva, 11 years her junior, who survives her.
· Vera Hruba Ralston, ice skater and actor, born June 12 1921; died February 9 2003
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Danielle Darrieux was born in 1917 in Bordeaux. Her first film part was at the age of 13 in “Le Bal” in 1931. She and Charles Boyer scored great popular success with “Mayerling”. She was brought to Hollywood to make “The Rage of Paris” in 1938. She returned to France thereafter. She made many films in France during World War Two. In 1951 she visited Hollywood again to make “Rich, Young and Pretty”. “The Greengage Summer” in 1961 with Kenneth More and Susannah York wone widespread praise. In 2002 she delivered a great performance in “8 Women”. She died at the age of 100 in 2017.
TCM Overview:
Affectionately known as “D.D.” to her fans, Danielle Darrieux established herself early on as a superb dramatic actress in films like “Mayerling” (1936), but choices she made during World War II inadvertently threatened her life. A resident of France during the occupation by Nazi Germany, Darrieux continued to work as an entertainer, an act that led her to being labeled a collaborator by the French underground and subjected to death threats. That cloud eventually faded and she continued to display considerable ability in classic films like “La Ronde” (“The Round”) (1950), “Le Plaisir” (“Pleasure”) (1952), “The Earrings of Madame de ” (1953), and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967). One of France’s most enduring performers, Darrieux had one of the longest-lasting careers in entertainment history, appearing in both motion picture and television productions well into her nineties.
Danielle Yvonne Marie Antoinette Darrieux was born on May 1, 1917 in Bordeaux, Gironde, France, but spent her formative years in Paris. Thanks to her utility with the cello, a musical career seemed in the cards for Darrieux, but that changed after she made her film debut in “Le Bal” (“The Ball”) (1931). Thirteen at the time of shooting, Darrieux earned attention for her portrayal of an obstinate teenager, which led to invitations for more movie work. She really made her mark a few years later opposite international matinee idol Charles Boyer in the period romantic drama “Mayerling” (1936) and the success of that production resulted in an invitation from Universal Pictures’ to play the female lead in the engaging screwball comedy “The Rage of Paris” (1938).
Both the film and Darrieux were well-received, but her stay in Hollywood proved short-lived. Electing to go back home to France, she was forced to endure the German occupation of the country during World War II.
Following the end of the war, Darrieux returned to movie screens in “Adieu chérie” (“Goodbye Darling”) (1946) and her perceived indiscretions during the war were eventually overlooked. Notable credits during that time included Max Ophüls’ classic “La Ronde” (“The Round”) (1950), and she gave Hollywood another try in the MGM musical “Rich, Young and Pretty” (1950) and the spy thriller “5 Fingers” (1952). Darrieux also impressed in Ophüls’ “Le Plaisir” (“Pleasure”) (1952) and “The Earrings of Madame de ” (1953), as well as the three-hour epic “Napoléon” (1955) and the controversial adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1955). She made two more English language features, “Alexander the Great” (1956) and “The Greengage Summer” (1961), before concentrating solely on European productions, including “The Devil and the Ten Commandments” (1962) and Jacques Demy’s delightful musical “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967).
Darrieux brought her facility for live stage work to Broadway in “Coco” (1969-1970), where she replaced original star Katherine Hepburn, and the short-lived musical “Ambassador” (1972). The 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s found her cast in fewer motion pictures, but she more than made up for that with numerous TV-movie and miniseries appearances. As the new century dawned, Darrieux showed few signs of slowing down, adding even more credits to an incredible resumé that was among the longest and most impressive for any performer from any country. Based on such films as “8 Women” (2002), “Towards Zero” (2007), and “Pièce montée” (“Cake”) (2010), Darrieux’s talents remained well in evidence during her ninth decade.
By John Charles
The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.
“Guardian” obituary:
There are few actors who embodied many people’s idea of a French woman of the world more than Danielle Darrieux, who has died aged 100. Starting as an ingenue in the 1930s, she grew into a sophisticate in the 40s and 50s, and retained a dignified and magical presence in films into the new century.
The outstanding examples of her art were the three films Darrieux made with the German-born Max Ophüls when she was in her 30s. In La Ronde (1950), she played the married woman who is seduced by a student (Daniel Gélin). The second and best of the three adapted tales by Guy de Maupassant in Le Plaisir (House of Pleasure, 1952) is La Maison Tellier, in which Darrieux played one of a group of prostitutes paying an annual holiday visit to the country. But it was the title role of Madame de … (1953, released in English as The Earrings of Madame de …) that gave her even more of a chance to shine as a fickle socialite who sells her earrings to pay off a debt, unbeknown to her husband (Charles Boyer).
Darrieux’s father was an army doctor who died when she was seven. Born in Bordeaux, but brought up in Paris, she was studying the cello at the Conservatoire when her ambitious mother entered the 14-year-old Danielle for an audition for an adolescent role in Le Bal (1931), directed by the Austrian Wilhelm Thiele. Many of her best films were made by German or Austrian director.
In 1934, she appeared in Curtis Bernhardt’s L’Or dans la Rue, and in Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed), co-directed by Billy Wilder (with Alexander Esway), his first film made outside Germany. The latter, an appealing comedy-drama of an amateur crook lured by Darrieux into joining a professional gang, was a superb showcase for her talents. In the same year, she married the director Henri Decoin, with whom she made several films before their divorce in 1940.
The following year, Darrieux’s star status was established when she was ideally cast as the tragic adolescent Marie Vetsera to Boyer’s Crown Prince Rudolph in Anatole Litvak’s Mayerling, the first and arguably the best of the various screen versions of this tale of doomed love. A few years later, Darrieux made a successful Hollywood debut in the title role of The Rage of Paris (1938), as a penniless French chorus girl in New York seeking a rich husband. However, she never had any intention of making a career outside France, and returned to make a few films before the Nazi occupation of her country in 1940.
Although she did not make any films during the occupation, Darrieux entertained German troops with the cabaret act she had perfected, and went on a publicity trip to Germany with a group of other French stars. Now married to the Dominican diplomat and polo player Porfirio Rubirosa, she became a target for criticism, but was exonerated after the liberation. Coincidentally, in 1956, Jean Renoir wrote a play for her and Paul Meurisse called Carola, about an affair between a French actress and a German general during the occupation. Although Darrieux was quite willing to perform it, the project failed to materialise. (It was later produced as a television play starring Leslie Caron and Mel Ferrer.)
Darrieux embarked on a prestigious postwar career, which included the three Ophüls masterpieces. She starred in Claude Autant-Lara’s sparkling adaptation of the Feydeau farce Occupe-Toi d’Amélie (Keep an Eye on Amelia, 1949) as a Parisian cocotte, dividing her favours among three men. The film incurred local bans in Britain and enraged American critics who, in the moralistic climate of the times, considered it lewd and immoral.
Darrieux’s worldly reputation got her cast as an independent woman who had deserted her Texan husband many years before for the more sophisticated Parisian life in the MGM musical Rich, Young and Pretty (1951). Jane Powell played her daughter on a visit to Paris, understandably dazzled by her mother. The highlights of the film are Darrieux’s duet with Fernando Lamas, We Never Talk Much, and her rendition of There’s Danger in Your Eyes, Chérie.
She made an impression in another American film, Joseph L Mankiewicz’s witty espionage thriller 5 Fingers (1952), as a down-and-out countess, attractive but duplicitous, who becomes entangled with a spy (James Mason). Back in France, she was a superb Madame de Rénal in Autant-Lara’s Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1954), sexually involved with Julien Sorel (Gérard Philipe), her children’s tutor.
She was a natural to star in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1955), and was seduced by Philipe again in Pot Bouille (The House of Lovers, 1957), Julien Duvivier’s stylish adaptation from Zola’s novel of snobbery and ambition among the bourgeoisie. In between, she stood around glumly as Olympias, the mother of Alexander, in Alexander the Great (1956), Robert Rossen’s dour epic starring Richard Burton in a blond wig.
FacebookTwitter the next decades, Darrieux was more often seen on television than on the big screen, but turned up in films from time to time to remind international audiences of her appealing presence. Among these were Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967), in which she was the mother, Yvonne, being courted by Monsieur Dame (Michel Piccoli), though marriage to him would make her Madame Dame; and 24 Hours in a Woman’s Life (1968), based on Stefan Zweig’s short story, in which she played a society widow who encounters a handsome young man at a casino in an Italian resort in 1914.
In 1970, she replaced Katharine Hepburn on Broadway in the musical Coco. Although she was far more suitable than Hepburn in the role of the Parisian couturier Coco Chanel, and got good reviews, audience attendance diminished. It was, after all, 14 years since her last Hollywood film. But Darrieux remained one of the biggest and brightest stars in France, bringing class to mostly mediocre material.
Some bright exceptions were François Ozon’s 8 Women (2002), an amusing all-female whodunnit, and Demy’s Une Chambre en Ville (A Room in Town, 1982) a romance in which Darrieux, the only undubbed lead, played a wealthy, tippling landlady. She provided the voice of the grandmother in the animated feature Persepolis (2007), and her last film was Pièce Montée (The Wedding Cake, 2010), a family comedy in which Darrieux played a glamorous grandmother.
Her marriage to Rubirosa ended in divorce in 1947, and the following year she married the author Georges Mitsinkidès. He died in 1991. Their son, Mathieu, also predeceased her.
•Danielle Darrieux, actor, born 1 May 1917; died 17 October 2017
Francis Lederer was born in 1899 in Prague. After serving World Ward One he began acting with the New German Theatre. In 1931 he won great success in London in “Volpone” and then Dodie Smith’s “Autumn Crocus” when he then performed in on Broadway. He remained in the U.S. and went on to Hollywood and appeared in “Men of Two Worlds” in 1934, “Midnight”, “Confessions of a Nazi Spy”, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” and “Diary of a Chambermaid”. His film career wound down in the early 1950’s by which time he had become very wealthy through real estate investments. Francis Lederer died in 2000 at the age of 100.
Ronald Bergan’s obituary of Francis Lederer in “The Guardian”:
It could be argued that a pair of lederhosen made the Czech-born actor Francis Lederer, who has died aged 100, into a Hollywood star. He wore them in Dodie Smith’s play, Autumn Crocus, first in London, and then on Broadway in the role of a young married Tyrolean innkeeper with whom an English schoolteacher falls in love. James Agate, reviewing it at the Lyric theatre in April 1931, wrote: “The whole piece hangs or falls by the innkeeper’s charm, and the amount of this commodity produced by Mr Lederer is colossal. In addition, he is an extremely fine actor.”
Unfortunately, being a foreign actor, Lederer never really fulfilled his potential in America. “The studios didn’t know how to handle him or how to buy stories for him,” wrote Ginger Rogers, his co-star in Romance In Manhattan (1934). “Hollywood was a very parochial place, and once classified, actors could not easily break out of the mould.” Lederer believed his inherent shyness – he hated to do publicity for his films – worked against his becoming as big a romantic star as, say, Charles Boyer.
Born Frantisek Lederer in Prague, the son of a leather merchant, he won a scholarship to the city’s academy of music and dramatic art before he was 18, and began a stage career while still in his teens. By the late 1920s, he was a matinee idol in Berlin, Vienna and other European capitals, notably as Romeo to Elisabeth Bergner’s Juliet in a celebrated Max Reinhardt production.
In 1930, Lederer, who could sing and dance, came to London to appear in Meet My Sister, for which he learned his part phonetically, as he had little English. After it flopped he went into Autumn Crocus, opposite Fay Compton, which ran for 18 months. His success on Broadway in the same play in 1934 led to a contract with RKO studios.
He had made around half a dozen films in Europe previously, including Pandora’s Box (1929), a classic of the German silent cinema, in which he played the young writer Alva, one of many men destroyed by femme fatale Lulu (Louise Brooks). There was an intimate scene between Lederer and Brooks, in which the director GW Pabst insisted she wear nothing underneath her dress. “Who would know?” Brooks asked. “Lederer,” Pabst replied.
In The Wonderful Life Of Nina Petrova (also 1929), he made it perfectly clear to audiences why Brigitte Helm should give up her jewels, villa and rich lover to live modestly with him, a penniless young lieutenant.
Lederer’s Hollywood debut in Man of Two Worlds (1934), was, strangely for someone bought by RKO as a romantic European lead, as an Eskimo introduced into the complexities of western civilisation, a role he played with an ingratiating blend of naivete and bemusement.
In many of his following films, he showed a deftness for light comedy, playing an illegal immigrant helping chorus-girl Ginger Rogers in Romance In Manhattan (1935); a prince posing as a bellboy in William Wyler’s The Gay Deception, (also 1935), and an actor who causes a scandal by accidentally kissing Ida Lupino in the cinema while under the spell of the picture in One Rainy Afternoon (1936). In 1938, he took the title role in The Lone Wolf In Paris, as a jewel thief turned detective – perhaps the only time he appeared as a true American.
After playing a gigolo on whom Claudette Colbert uses her charms to distract him from John Barrymore’s wife in Midnight (1939), Lederer demonstrated more range and depth than he had been able to hitherto in three anti-Nazi movies.
I n Confessions Of A Nazi Spy (1939), as a downtrodden German-American who steals secrets and becomes a Nazi agent to support his family, he managed to imbue this unsympathetic weasel with humanity. In The Man I Married (1940), he played an initially lovable German-American who becomes a rabid Nazi after visiting his father in Germany, and in Voice In The Wind (1944) he was a Czech pianist who is tortured by the Nazis and looses his memory. He was also superb in Jean Renoir’s The Diary Of A Chambermaid (1946) as Joseph, the sadistic valet, given to piercing the throats of geese with a needle. Lederer then returned to the stage for a few years, appearing in Noel Coward’s Relative Values in Germany, and as Anne Frank’s father in The Diary Of Anne Frank in America. When he went back to the screen, his image had eased into a narrower range of character parts.
However, he was still able to be both a charming and sinister vampire in The Return Of Dracula (1958). “They wanted me to wear fangs,” he explained, “but I refused, saying it was old hat and I would have looked foolish.” Neither did he use a cape, but merely wore his overcoat over his shoulders. In his last feature, Terror Is A Man (1958), a Filipino horror film, he was a mad doctor who turned a leopard into a leopard man.
Aside from his stage and screen work, Lederer did a great deal of television, for which he adapted Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and was the chief villain in the first Mission Impossible (1967). He also taught acting for many years, helped found the American National Academy of Performing Arts and the Holly wood museum, was active in civic affairs, and made a fortune from property.
Since 1942, he lived on a ranch in the San Fernando valley with Marion Irving, his third wife.
• Francis Lederer, actor, born November 6 1899; died May 25 2000
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed on lune here.
Cornell Borchers was born in 1925 in Lithuania. In 1950 she was cast opposite Montgomery Clift in “The Big Lift”. In 1953 she won acclaim for her performance in “The Divided Heart”. She was brought to Hollywood in 1956 to make “Never Say Goodbye” opposite Rock Hudson and then “Flood Tide” with George Nader after which she returned to Europe. She died in 2014.
She married twice, to Bruce Cunningham and to Dr.Anton Schelkopf (akaDr. Toni Schelkopf, Toni Schelkopf or Schelkopf Toni), a PsychologistDoctor and Film Producer whom she met twice when she starred in his filmsSchule für Eheglück (1954) and Rot ist die Liebe (1957), later divorced, by whom she had at least one daughter, Julia Schelkopf, born in Munich, on 15 September 1962, who married at Aufkirchen on 30 May 1987 HSH Friedrich Wilhelm Philipp Georg Heinrich Jakob 7th Fürst von Hanau und zu Horowitz Graf vonSchaumburg, born in Munich on 26 June 1959, and by whom she had three children: HSH Tassilo Hubertus Heinrich Antonius Erbprinz von Hanau und zu Horowitz Erbgraf von Schaumburg (born Starnberg, 8 November 1987), HSH Philippa Maria Theresia Prinzessin von Hanau und zu Horowitz Gräfin von Schaumburg (born Starnberg, 15 January 1989) and HSH Thaddäus Carl Heinrich Prinz von Hanau und zu Horowitz Graf von Schaumburg (bornStarnberg, 16 June 1995). She lived in Bavaria, Germany in July 2007 and died in 2014.
Her”Wikipedia” entry cn also be accessed online here.
IMDB entry:
Tall, blonde, turquoise-eyed Cornell Borchers was born of Lithuanian ancestry and studied medicine before turning towards a career in the performing arts. She attended drama classes from 1947 to 1948 and was discovered for films by the director Arthur Maria Rabenalt. She made a few German films before signing a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. Publicity quickly touted her as the new Ingrid Bergman, but her first Hollywood sojourn turned out to be rather brief.
After just one picture, The Big Lift (1950), Cornell walked out on her contract, convinced that quality roles were not forthcoming. For a while, her career lost its direction and she toiled away in a brace of minor German crime dramas and romances. Fortuitously, she was then snapped up by Michael Balcon for his Ealing production of The Divided Heart (1954), a sober post-war drama for which Cornell won a BAFTA award as Best Foreign Actress.
This rekindled Hollywood’s interest and Universal-International signed her to a two-picture-a-year deal. She was co-starred opposite Rock Hudson in the melodrama Never Say Goodbye (1956), and, in Ingrid Bergman-like fashion (even rather sounding like her) beguiled Errol Flynn in the romantic espionage dramaIstanbul (1957).
Her swan song was an undistinguished social drama entitled Flood Tide(1958), a misfire, which resulted in Universal failing to renew her contract.
Cornell returned to Germany, having reached what amounted to be the apex of her career. She eventually quit acting in 1959, devoting herself to her family and living a secluded life away from the limelight.
Bernhard Wicki was born in 1919 in Austria. He was placed in a concentration camp during World War Two. His films include 1953’s “Die letzte Brucke” and in 1959 in “Die Brucke”. He died in Munich in 2000.
Eva Renzi was born in 1944 in Berlin. Her film debut was in “Playgirl” in 1966. The same year she acted opposite Michael Caine in “Funeral in Berlin”. She went to Hollywood to make “The Pink Jungle” with James Garner in 1968. She did not remain in the U.S. but chose to continue her career in Europe. Her other films include “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” and “A Taste for Excitement”. Eva Renzi died in 2005 at the age of 60 in Berlin.
Paul Hubschmid was born in Switzerland in 1917. His film debut came in the Swiss film “Fusiler Wipf” in 1938. In 1949 he went to Hollywood, changed his name to Paul Christian and made “Bagdad” with Maureen O’Hara. His other U.S. movies included “The Beast from 20.000 Fathoms”. He died in 2001 in Berlin.
IMDB entry:
The son of an accountant, Paul Hubschmid was born, raised and schooled in Schoenenwerd, Switzerland. He trained for an acting career at the Max Reinhardt Seminar of Dramatic Art in Vienna and first appeared on stage at the Vienna Volkstheater in 1937. His motion picture debut took place the following year. He was cast as the titular hero in the patriotic Swiss production Füsilier Wipf (1938), which was directed by that nation’s pre-eminent film maker of the time, Leopold Lindtberg. The role opened the doors for the tall (1.92 m), wavy-haired and handsome actor and he soon moved on to a more lucrative career in Germany. After a stint with the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, he slipped effortlessly into a succession of romantic leads opposite established stars such as Luise Ullrich (Der Fall Rainer (1942)) and Hilde Krahl (Meine Freundin Josefine (1942)).
His presence in German films during the Nazi period (though mostly in light entertainments without significant political content) did not prove detrimental to his spell in Hollywood, which began with a seven-year contract in 1948. Having almost no perceptible trace of an accent, he fitted right into the role of ‘Paul Christian’, the stage name which was assigned to him for the handful of films he made in tinseltown. Some were outright stinkers, like No Time for Flowers (1952), which veered uneasily between silly comedy and fruity melodrama. Best of the bunch was the cult sci-fi The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), which started the cycle of giant monster films in the 1950’s and featured the work of renowned special effects expert Ray Harryhausen. The film cost a mere $200,000 to make and grossed in excess of $ 5 million. With the audience attention firmly fixed on the dinosaur, the cast seemed at times redundant. Paul, in the leading role of scientist Tom Nesbitt, did the best he could with the clichéd script. Since no better parts were forthcoming, Paul dissolved his contract after just four years and returned home.
Back in Germany, he was considerably better served in the role of composer Franz Lisztin the Franco-German co-production Hungarian Rhapsody (1954); and in a trilogy of hugely popular escapist adventure films, exotically set in India: Tiger of Bengal (1959),The Tomb of Love (1959) and Tiger of Bengal (1960). Paul had aged remarkably well and was able to carry off his romantic leading man image into the 1960’s. From the beginning of the decade, he also moved into character acting, playing Professor Higgins in “My Fair Lady” more than 2000 times on stage, most frequently at Berlin’s Theater des Westens. On screen, he now appeared more frequently as bon vivants, reprobates or villains, most memorable as double agent Johnny Vulkan in Funeral in Berlin (1966), the second of Len Deighton‘s Harry Palmer trilogy. In 1980, he was awarded the German Filmband in Gold. During the 1980’s he scaled down his workload, confining himself to guesting in made-for-television movies and series. He retired from acting in 1992 and died nine years later in Berlin at the age of 84 of a pulmonary embolism.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Paul Hugo Hubschmid, actor: born Schönenwerd, Switzerland 20 July 1917; married 1942 Ursula von Teubern (died 1963; one son), 1967 Eva Renzi (one adopted daughter; marriage dissolved 1980); 1985 Irene Schiesser; died Berlin 31 December 2001.
Billed in his English-speaking films as Paul Christian, the Swiss-born actor Paul Hubschmid was a popular leading man in European films in the years after the Second World War (despite having worked in German films during the war), his virile good looks compensating for a stiff acting style. Later he won praise as a fine character player in such films as Funeral in Berlin, and by the end of his 50-year acting career he had made over 120 films.
Extremely popular in Germany on both screen and stage (he played over 2,000 performances of My Fair Lady in Berlin), he was once dubbed “the most beautiful man in post-war German cinema”. Between 1948 and 1953 he made several films in Hollywood, and will best be remembered by English-speaking audiences as the hero of the classic monster movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).
Born in Schönenwerd, Switzerland, in 1917, he went to Vienna in 1937 to train as an actor at the Max Reinhardt Academy. He made his screen début in the Swiss film Fusilier Wipf, released in 1938, and made his first German film, Maria Ilona, in 1939. During the war years he acted in the German theatre and appeared in a dozen more films including Meine Freundin Josefine (1942) and Liebesbriefe (1943).
Universal took him to Hollywood in 1949, renamed him Paul Christian, and gave him the star role opposite Maureen O’Hara in the Arabian Nights adventure Bagdad. As the leader of a desert group, “the Black Riders”, he had a Valentino-like role, unmasking the villain (Vincent Price) who has kidnapped O’Hara’s sheikh father and winning the heroine for himself. Critics were unimpressed by Christian’s acting, but conceded that he had the dashing looks to suit the part.
Bagdad was the sort of film Universal had been making for several years with Maria Montez starring, and the formula was no longer proving as potent at the box office. Ironically, Christian’s next film, The Thief of Venice(made in 1950 but not released until 1952), co-starred Montez in what was to be her last film before her sudden death. Directed by John Brahm in Venice on sets left over from Orson Welles’s Othello, it took place in the Middle Ages, with Christian a naval officer who takes up thieving to acquire the funds to combat the evil Inquisitor (Massimo Serato), with Montez the tavern keeper who helps him.
Christian next starred in Don Siegel’s No Time For Flowers (1952), a Ninotchka-like comedy made in Vienna (though set in Prague) in which Christian was a Czechoslovakian party official who tests the loyalty of his secretary by tempting her with such Western delights as bubble baths, cosmetics, champagne and nylons. The secretary was played by Viveca Lindfors (Mrs Siegel at the time), and inevitably (since the film was made at the height of the Cold War) both she and Christian succumb to temptation at the film’s end and flee to Austria’s US Zone.
Siegel, aware of the film’s debt to Ninotchka, later blamed its failure on a budget-conscious producer, a dull script, the fact that he was admittedly no Lubitsch (“or Viveca would have given Greta Garbo a run for her money”) and Christian, who “was much too stiff and without the charm and fun of Melvyn Douglas”.
Despite having starred in three internationally distributed films, Christian was not yet an established name, but his next film was an enormous success, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Based on Ray Bradbury’s haunting short story “The Foghorn”, the film spawned so many cheap imitations that is is surprising now to realise that it was the first film to deal with a prehistoric monster unearthed by an atomic explosion and going on a rampage through a major city. Christian was effective enough as the scientist who first realises the truth but is not believed, but it was Eugène Lourié’s atmospheric direction and in particular the splendid special effects of Ray Harryhausen that turned the $250,000 film into a hit that grossed $5m.
Returning to live in Germany, Christian was leading man to the musical star Marika Roekk in Maske in Blau (1953), the first of many German and Italian films in which he starred, usually as a handsome charmer or a swashbuckling action hero. By the end of the decade he had won great acclaim for his stage portrayal of Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady and reverted to the name Paul Hubschmid, though for those films that obtained release in English-speaking countries he was billed as Paul Christian. These included Rommel’s Treasure (Il Tesoro di Rommel, 1955), co-starring Dawn Addams, and The Day the Sky Exploded (La morte viene dallo spazio, 1958), photographed by Mario Bava, later a noted director, and described by The Monthly Film Bulletin as “the stock-shot film par excellence“.
In 1958 he starred in the two-part Fritz Lang epic Der Tiger von Eschnapur/Das indische Grabmal, which Lang based on the pulp serial he and Joe May had scripted in 1921. In the comic-strip adventure Christian was an architect who rescues a young dancer from a tiger, falls in love with her, then has to flee with her when the Maharajah, who loves the dancer, threatens to bury her alive. Praised for its use of colour, decor and wide-screen photography, the (196-minute) two-part movie was shown complete in most European countries, but was dubbed and shown as one 94-minute film in Britain (as Tigress of Bengal) and the US (as Journey to the Lost City).
In 1965 the actor, billed as Hubschmid, supported Steve Cochran and Hildegarde Neff in a British adventure film, Mozambique, and the following year had a prime role as Johnny Vulkan, former black-market crony of spy Harry Palmer and now a British agent, in Funeral in Berlin, with critics noting that the ageing actor had gained authority and conviction with the years.
He returned to Universal Studios to play a German baron wed by a Parisian intelligence agent (Anjanette Comer) before the Second World War in the espionage adventure In Enemy Country (1968), and an evil Dutch scientist who wants to use for his own ends missing-link humanoids discovered in New Guinea by explorers Burt Reynolds and Susan Clark in the risible Skullduggery (1970).
The actor, whose last film was the German comedy Linda (1991), used to say that he wondered if his looks had not been detrimental to his acting career, and he entitled his 1994 autobiography Schöner Mann, was nun?(“Beautiful Man, What Now?”).
