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 F i l m P e o p l e A - C
Austrian, German and Swiss Film People in Hollywood (Part I - A-C)
Also see > An Introduction to how these people are selected
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“I really don't consider L.A. to be much of a city. It's really more
like a conglomerate of people. But it is to filmmakers what Paris
is for painters: sooner or later, the best end up here.”
— Bernd Eichinger, German film producer
ALSO SEE: Complete Index of Film People
A
Percy Adlon (1935- )
German director. Films: Sugarbaby (1985), Bagdad Cafe (1988) with Jack Palance and Marianne Sägebrecht (filmed in the US; later a short-lived TV series with Whoopi Goldberg), Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989) with Sägebrecht and Judge Reinhold (set in Stuttgart, Arkansas), and Salmonberries (1991) with K.D. Lang and Rosel Zech.
Mario Adorf (1930- )
German actor who has made one Hollywood movie, Major Dundee (1965), and many European films, including the British Ten Little Indians (1966) and Volker Schlöndorff's famous 1979 German production The Tin Drum.
Paul Andor (Wolfgang Zilzer, 1901-1991)
German actor who had a bit part in Casablanca and minor roles in other films.
Ursula Andress (1936- )
Swiss-American actress whose US/British career began with the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962). She played “decorative leads” (E. Katz) in many European and American films, including She (1965), What's New Pussycat? (1965), The Blue Max (1966) and Casino Royale (1967).
Sig Arno (Siegfried Aron, 1895-1975)
German actor. After leaving Germany in 1933, Arno had a career in Hollywood and in several Broadway productions. Arno played mostly comedic character roles. His films include: The Mummy's Hand (1940), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Nancy Goes To Rio (1950).
Fred Astaire
(Frederick Austerlitz, 1899-1987)
Austrian-American actor, dancer (Flying Down to Rio, Top Hat, On the Beach, The Towering Inferno) born to an Austrian father in Omaha, Nebraska. Astaire was born just four years after his father arrived in America from Austria. He and his sister Adele were encouraged to take dancing lessons by their mother. Astaire's Austrian roots probably go back to Vienna or nearby Eisenstadt. More on our Fred Astaire page.
Mary Astor (Lucille V. Langhanke, 1906- )
American actress whose German-born father encouraged her to enter a beauty contest. (The Prisoner of Zenda, Little Women, The Maltese Falcon, A Kiss Before Dying, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte)
ALSO SEE: Complete Index of Film People
B
Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske, 1924- )
American actress of German-Jewish heritage, most famous as Humphrey Bogart's partner, both on and off screen (they married in 1945). Bronx-born Bacall got her screen name from her German-Romanian grandmother, who raised her after her parents' divorce in 1930. After a modeling stint and several minor Broadway acting roles, the 19-year-old Bacall got a film contract from director Howard Hawks (who added an L to grandma Weinstein-Bacal's name). She soon became famous for both her sexy looks and her sultry “trombone” voice. In the 1970s and '80s Bacall returned to Broadway, winning a Tony for her role in “Applause.” In recent years Bacall has continued her film career, playing occasional character parts. Selected films: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), Key Largo (1948), Blood Alley (1955), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Shootist (1976), The Fan (1981), Misery (1990), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Michael Ballhaus (1935- )
German cinematographer (The Color of Money, Good Fellas, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Quiz Show) who has often worked with director Martin Scorsese (Age of Innocence). Ballhaus worked with fellow-German Wolfgang Petersen for the first time on Outbreak (1995) and later on Air Force One (1997). His more recent film credits include Wild Wild West (1999), Gangs of New York (2002), and Something's Gotta Give (2003).
John Banner (1910-1973)
Austrian actor. Born in Vienna, Banner is best known as Sergeant Schultz in the TV series “Hogan's Heroes” (along with Werner Klemperer). His films include: The Moon Is Down (1943), Operation Eichmann (1961) and The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968).
Lex Barker (1919-1973)
American actor who played Tarzan in five films and later appeared in “spaghetti Westerns” and adventure films. In the 1960s, through his roles in Karl May adventure films such as Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962) and Winnetou (1963), Barker was far better known in Germany than in the US.
Albert Bassermann (1867-1952)
German actor born in Mannheim. Bassermann played character parts after his arrival in Hollywood in 1939. He returned to Germany a few years before he died in a plane crash. His films included Foreign Correspondent (1940, Acad. Award. nomination; directed by Alfred Hitchcock), The Shanghai Gesture (1941, directed by Josef von Sternberg), The Moon and Sixpence (1942), and Escape Me Never (1947).
WEB LINK > Albert Bassermann from IMDb
Senta Berger (1941- )
Berger left Hollywood for good in 1970, after she had become familiar to US movie and TV audiences in the 1960s. Born in Vienna, Berger gained stage and film experience there before working in two US film productions that happened to be filming in the Austrian capital: Secret Ways (1961, with Richard Widmark) and Disney's The Waltz King (1962). After she appeared in The Victors (1963), filmed in London with Albert Finney, Berger's international film career took off. During the five-year period from 1964 to 1969 she worked primarily in Hollywood, starring next to Charlton Heston in Major Dundee (1965) and appearing in The Glory Guys (1965), Bang Bang, You're Dead (1966), Cast a Giant Shadow (1966, with Kirk Douglas), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969), and other film and TV productions. In Munich she formed a production company with her husband, the German director Michael Verhoeven. Berger produced the excellent Die weisse Rose (1983, directed by Verhoeven), the story of the student anti-Nazi resistance group headed by Hans and Sophie Scholl.
Theodore Bikel (1924- )
Austrian actor, musician born in Vienna. His family moved to Palastine in 1938, when Bikel was 14. For his first film role he played a German naval officer in John Huston's African Queen (1951). Bikel has also appeared in many Broadway and TV productions. Other films: The Enemy Below (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), My Fair Lady (1964).
Betty Boop (1931-1939)
Betty was created by the Austrian-born cartoonist Max Fleischer (1883-1972). Boop's career was cut short by the Hayes Commission (Film Production Code) which found her to be far too erotic and immoral for American moviegoers. Fleischer and his brother Dave (as producer) also animated Popeye the Sailor in 1933 (the Popeye character was created in 1929 by Elzie Segar of Chester, Illinois) and the “Out of the Inkwell” series (1919-1929) which was revived for TV in the early 1960s. The Fleischer team – Disney's biggest competition in the 1930s – came up with many technical and creative innovations, one of the most famous being the bouncing-ball sing-along films. Max alone registered 15 patents, including the “Rotoscope” technique for making animated figures move more realistically. Another important Fleischer innovation was mixing live action and animated figures. Max Fleischer's son, Richard Fleischer (1916- ), directed many well-known movies, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Boston Strangler (1968) and Soylent Green (1973).
WEB LINK > Betty Boop
Curt Bois (1901-1991)
German actor whose long career included Casablanca (1942), Cover Girl (1944), and Wings of Desire (1988).
Klaus Maria Brandauer (Klaus Georg Steng, 1944- )
Actor born in Bad Aussee, Austria on 22 June 1944. After a stage career in Austria and Germany, Brandauer's first film was The Salzburg Connection (1971). Although he has appeared in a number of films since then, Brandauer has continued to perform in live theater and in “Jedermann” at the Salzburg Festival. Other films: Never Say Never Again (1983), Mephisto (1981), Out of Africa (1985, Golden Globe Award), Blue Velvet (1986), The Russia House (1990) and White Fang (1991).
Bertolt Brecht (Berthold Eugen Friedrich, 1898-1956)
German poet, playwright, screenwriter born in Augsburg, Bavaria on 10 Feb. 1898. In the 1930s, Brecht collaborated with composer Kurt Weill on works such as “The Threepenny Opera.” Although he did not do a lot of film work, Brecht became one of the few successful film freelancers in the Hollywood system of the early 1940s. He worked with Fritz Lang on the script for Hangmen Also Die (1942). Brecht and other artists in the Germanic exile community (such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, William Dieterle, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Kortner, and Bruno Frank — along with some Americans) would gather at writer Lion Feuchtwanger's home (Villa Aurora) in Pacific Palisades for discussions and readings. Despite his disdain for Hollywood (see Brecht's lines about Hollywood on the next page), Brecht did have respect for some of its people and films: Citizen Kane (1940), The Seventh Cross (1944, directed by Fred Zinnemann), Charles Laughton (who performed in the English stage version of Brecht's “Leben des Galilei” that premiered in 1947 in Los Angeles, and later in NY.), and Lang's Fury (1941). In 1949 Brecht moved to East Berlin where he died in 1956.
Felix Bressart (1890-1949)
German actor who came to Hollywood in 1937 after fleeing Nazi Germany via France. In the US he was busy as a character actor in many films of the 1940s. Some of his films: Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Comrade X (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942), Above Suspicion (1943, also with Conrad Veidt), A Song Is Born (1948), Portrait of Jennie (1949).
Louise Brooks (1906-1985)
Mary Louise Brooks was born in Kansas. She left Hollywood for Germany at the age of 23 and made her best pictures (Diary of a Lost Girl, Pandora's Box) there with director G.W. Pabst in 1928-29. Brooks died a recluse in Rochester, New York but still has an amazing following for a star who made so few pictures — her last in 1938.
WEB LINK > Louise Brooks
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ALSO SEE: Complete Index of Film People
C
Bernt Capra (1934- )
Austrian art director, set designer
Mady Christians (1900-1951)
Austrian actress who first came to America in 1912 as a child, only to return to Austria with her mother after the outbreak of the First World War. Back in the US after 1931, she died a victim of the Red scare of the 1950s, unjustly blacklisted and persecuted by the HUAC witchhunt. Films: Come and Get It (1936), Heidi (1937, with Shirley Temple), Address Unknown (1944), All My Sons (1948, with Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Letter was directed by Max Ophuls and based on a work by German author Stefan Zweig.
Ricardo Cortez (Jacob Krantz, 1899-1977)
Austrian actor, director. Often cast as a suave Latin-lover, Cortez (Krantz) was born in Vienna. At the age of three he came to the US and had a long career as both a leading and supporting actor from the silent era into the 1950s. Cortez also directed seven films in the 1930s. His younger brother, Stanley Cortez, was a cinematographer. Some Cortez films (as an actor): The Maltese Falcon (1931, as the first Sam Spade), Flesh (1932), Special Agent (1935), Mr. Moto's Last Warning (1939), Charlie Chan in Reno (1939).
Michael Curtiz (Mihaly Kertész, 1888-1962)
Curtiz was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), but he went to Austria and Germany around 1919. He directed films there and in several other European countries before heading for Hollywood in 1926 at the invitation of Warner Brothers, where he directed more than 100 films, including some classic films noirs. But Curtiz is best known for his all-time Warner classic Casablanca.
ALSO SEE: Complete Index of Film People
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