Emil Jannings (1884-1950)

     Winner of the First Oscar for Best Actor

Emil Jannings (front left) in his Hollywood pool with Conrad Veidt (r.) and Jannings' wife Gussy Holl in the 1920s.  > FILMS

In 1929 the German actor Emil Jannings became the very first actor to receive the Academy Award for Best Actor. (Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award that year.) Jannings’ Oscar for his cinematic work in 1927/1928 was announced at a low-key event that was not even broadcast on the radio. (That happened the following year.) But Jannings was not in attendance. He had already departed the US for Europe. However, the Academy had graciously granted his request to receive his Oscar statuette prior to his departure. In those days the Academy Awards were not kept secret and the winners had been announced prior to the very first awards ceremony held on May 16, 1929 in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

	Emil Jannings as the tragic figure, English teacher Prof. Rath in THE BLUE ANGEL (1930). Jannings co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in his first talkie—in English and German.

Jannings’ Oscar honor was a first in several ways. The 1929 awards marked the first time that the Academy had a public awards ceremony. Emil Jannings was not only the first actor ever to win the award, but also remains to this day the first and only German male ever to receive the Academy’s Best Actor prize. (Actress Luise Rainer was the first German recipient of the award for Best Actress, two times in a row—in 1937 and 1938.) Jannings was honored for his work in two films: The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, directed by the Austrian Josef von Sternberg. Because Jannings’ award statuette had been presented to him weeks before the actual ceremonies, it also became the first Oscar ever presented to anyone! (Note: When the first “Oscars” were awarded in 1929, they were not yet known by that nickname. The term Oscar did not make its first public appearance until 1934—in a movie columnist's reference to Katherine Hepburn's Best Actress award. The Academy itself did not use the name officially until five years later. “Oscar” is now a registered trademark of the Academy, as is the term “Academy Awards.” - More: Germany and Oscar and The Oscar and Other Awards - Oscars.org)

Although in his autobiography the actor falsely claimed Brooklyn as his birthplace, Emil Jannings (Theodor Friedrich Emil Janez, July 23, 1884 - January 3, 1950) was actually born in Rorschach, Switzerland to a German mother (Margarethe Schwabe) and an American father (Emil Janez). He grew up as a German citizen in Switzerland, Leipzig, and Görlitz, Germany.

Jannings began his acting career on the German stage. He made his first film in 1914, but his first real movie success came a few years later when he worked with the German (later Hollywood) director Ernst Lubitsch at the Ufa studios near Berlin. True fame came with his appearance in Lubitisch's silent Madame Dubarry in 1919, which soon turned him into a well-known star in Germany and the United States. Following his success as a film actor in Germany, particularly in Der letzte Mann (1924) and Faust (1926), both directed by F.W. Murnau, Jannings accepted an offer from Paramount to go to Hollywood in 1926.

In Hollywood he joined other Germans who had been lured to America. He was friends with fellow German actor Conrad Veidt and other German-speaking film people in California—actors, directors, art directors, and other film artists working in the American film capital.

EMIL JANNINGS in BRIEF Born: July 23, 1884 in Rorschach, Switzerland TRIVIA: Rohrschach is near Au, where actress Renée Zellweger's Swiss father was born. Parents: Margarethe Schwabe (German) and Emil Janez (American) Wives: Wife 1 (name unknown; daughter Ruth Maria), (2) Hanna Ralph, (3) Lucie Höflich, and (4) Gussy Holl TRIVIA: German actress Gussy Holl was married to Conrad Veidt from 1918 to 1922 before she became Jannings' fourth wife. (See photo above.) First Films: Arme Eva and Passionels Tagebuch in 1914 Academy Award 1929: Best Actor in The Way of All Flesh (1927) and The Last Command (1928) TRIVIA: The Way of All Flesh has gone the way of all flesh: only an 8-minute segment of the 1928 film is known to survive Last Film: Wo ist Herr Belling? (1945, uncompleted) Banned: In 1945 the Allies place a lifelong filmwork ban on Jannings because of his cooperation with the Nazis. Died: January 2, 1950 in Strobl, Austria, of cancer

The sound era in Hollywood meant dim prospects for Jannings, with his heavily accented English. (You can hear his English in the English-language version of The Blue Angel). He decided to return to Europe in 1929, buying a house in the picturesque Austrian town of Strobl am Wolfgangsee, and continuing his film work in Berlin.

MOVIE POSTER:
Jannings was the star of THE BLUE
ANGEL, but Dietrich stole the show.
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> Poster from Art.com

In Germany he starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in Ufa's classic Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), which was filmed in English simultaneously with the German version. But Dietrich soon left for Hollywood, while Jannings remained in Germany. When Hitler came to power, Jannings made pro-Nazi films and became an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich. (Dietrich became just the opposite in the US.) In 1941 German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels awarded Jannings the title of “Artist of the State.”

Jannings' pro-Nazi stance came back to haunt him when the war was over and he found himself on the losing side. In 1945 the Allies banned the former Nazi from ever doing any more film work. In 1947 he became an Austrian citizen. In Austria Jannings spent his last few unemployed years a bitter, isolated man. In 1950 the former star, known for his portrayals of tragic figures, died a tragic figure himself, of cancer at his home on the shore of the Wolfgangsee.

N E X T > Jannings Filmography & Links

M O R E > Germany, Austria, and the Oscars

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