Barbara Frey

German actress Barbara Frey (1941) was as a 16-year-old chosen to play the lead opposite Horst Buchholz in the romantic teenage drama Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love (1958). After her debut, she took acting classes and played in more similar films. During the 1960s she also appeared in Italian films.


German postcard by Ufa, Berlin-Tempelhof, no. B.F. 1. Photo: Nora Filmverleih.


German postcard by Ufa, Berlin-Tempelhof, no. FK 3943. Retail price: 25 Pfg. Photo: Interwest / Gloria Film / Grimm. Publicity still for Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love (Georg Tressler, 1958).

Romantic Teenage Dramas

Barbara Frey was born Barbara Freyde in Berlin in 1941. She completed an apprenticeship as a tailor before she turned to acting.

By chance, the sixteen-year-old Frey came to the attention of director Georg Tressler who promptly cast her in the leading female role in the romantic teenage drama Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love (Georg Tressler, 1958). Her co-star was teen idol Horst Buchholz who owed his big breakthrough to Tressler's film Die Halbstarken (Georg Tressler, 1956). In the romantic drama Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love, Buchholz played a womaniser who unexpectedly falls in love with his latest conquest (Frey).

Frey's voice had to be dubbed by Johanna von Koczian. The film's screenwriter, Will Tremper, recalled in his book 'Meine wilden Jahre' (My Wild Years): "Jürgl (Georg Tressler) found a lovely girl of perhaps 17, who seemed all too harmless to me, called Barbara Freyte in a clothing factory on Fehrbelliner Platz - my only contribution to his discovery was an eraser, with which I immediately rubbed out the last two letters of her name." Endstation Liebe received good reviews but could not match the box office success of Die Halbstarken as hoped. Nevertheless, it established Frey as a promising talent.

After her debut, Barbara took acting classes from Marlise Ludwig. She initially appeared mainly in youth and romantic dramas. Examples were ...und noch frech dazu!/And Saucy at That (Rolf von Sydow, 1959) and Mit 17 weint man nicht/17 Year Olds Don't Cry (Alfred Vohrer, 1960) with Matthias Fuchs. In Georg Tressler's social melodrama Geständnis einer Sechzehnjährigen/Confession of a Sixteen-year-old (1960), she played a teenager who wants to prevent her parents from divorcing. In the social drama Ich kann nicht länger schweigen/The Tragedy of Silence (Wolfgang Bellenbaum, 1961), she played a sixteen-year-old who undergoes an illegal abortion out of desperation and dies in the process. The film deals with the §218 of German law that forbade doctors to perform abortions in the 1960s.

Marcel Ophüls cast Frey as a pregnant woman in his German episode München/Munich of the much-praised anthology film Liebe mit zwanzig/L’amour à vingt ans/Love at Twenty (Francois Truffaut, Renzo Rossellini, Shintaro Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls, Andrzej Wajda, 1962). The French-produced omnibus project of Pierre Roustang consisted of five little 'cinemanecdotes' about the working of young love, each with a different director from a separate country. The episodes are held together by a series of still photographs of young lovers by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The film was entered into the 12th Berlin International Film Festival. Critic Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that the "German episode, directed by Marcel Ophuls, son of Max, gives a rather dubious notion of love in Germany. It tells how an unwed mother finally hooks the casual father of her child. It is charming but somewhat sentimental for the bitter story it tells."


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden/Westf., no. 2826. Retail price: 25 Pfg. Photo: Interwest / Gloria Film / Grimm. Barbara Frey and Horst Buchholz in Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love (Georg Tressler, 1958).


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden/Westf., no. 113. Retail price: 25 Pfg. Photo: Interwest / Gloria Film / Schlawe. Publicity still for Endstation Liebe/Last Stop Love (Georg Tressler, 1958).

Spaghetti Westerns

In the early 1960s, Barbara Frey appeared mainly in lighter fare. She acted in the crime thriller Mann im Schatten/Man in the Shadows (Arthur Maria Rabenalt, 1961) with Helmut Qualtinger and Ellen Schwiers and the Schlager comedies Was macht Papa denn in Italien?/What Is Father Doing in Italy? (Hans Dieter Schwarze, 1961) starring Willy Fritsch and Muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus/I Must Go to the City (Hans Deppe, 1962) starring singer Vico Torriani. In Austria, she made the cross-dressing farce Unsere tollen Tanten in der Südsee/Our Crazy Aunts in the South Seas (Rolf Olsen, 1964), as the girlfriend of Udo Jürgens.

From 1963, Frey also took on several television roles for example in the crime thriller Nachtzug D 106/Night Train D 106 (Helmuth Ashley, 1963) and the comedy Brave Diebe/Brave Thieves (Frank Scharf, 1965). In the cinema, she appeared in crime films such as the Austrian-French co-production Das Haus auf dem Hügel/The House on the Hill (Werner Klingler, 1964) and the Eurospy film Kommissar X: In den Klauen des goldenen Drachen/So Darling So Deadly (Gianfranco Parolini, 1966) starring Tony Kendall and Brad Harris. However, offers in Germany and Austria became rarer.

Instead, Frey appeared in several Italian (co-)productions. In the Italian-Spanish-German historical adventure film I Cento cavalieri/100 Horsemen (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1964), she played a Spanish mayor's daughter who falls in love with the son of a hostile sheikh. While shooting this film, Frey met the American actor Mark Damon, who worked almost exclusively in Europe. Later, the two became a couple. Frey also shot the Spaghetti Westerns Uno straniero a Sacramento/ Bounty for Ringo (Sergio Bergonzelli, 1965) starring bodybuilder Mickey Hargitey, and Pistoleros de Arizona/The Hunted of the Sierra Nevada (Alfonso Balcázar, 1965) in a cameo as a saloon girl.

With Mark Damon, she also starred in the realistic Italian-German Western Requiescant/Mögen sie in Frieden ruh'n/Kill and Pray (Carlo Lizzani, 1967), with Lou Castel as the hero and director Pier Paolo Pasolini as a priest. Frey played the hero's kidnapped stepsister and Mark Damon played against his image the vampire-like villain. The film was praised by critics and grossed almost half a billion Lire in Italy.

A short time later, Barbara Frey retired from acting. It is unknown whether the reason was a lack of role offers or her relationship with Mark Damon. She played her last role on German television in the Francis Durbridge Mini-series Ein Mann namens Harry Brent/A Man Called Harry Brent (1967) with Günther Ungeheuer. She married Mark Damon in 1971, but the marriage only lasted two years. During this time, Frey only made an uncredited appearance as a nurse in the American film Slaughterhouse-Five (George Roy Hill, 1972). After that, she no longer appeared as an actress.


German Postcard by Kolibri-Verlag G.m.b.h., Minden-Westf, no. 1285. Photo: Ultrafilm / Lilo. Publicity card for Mit 17 weint man nicht! (Alfred Vohrer, 1960).


German postcard by WS-Druck, Wanne-Eickel, no. 563. Photo: Lilo / Europa.

Sources: Bosley Crowther (The New York Times), Filmportal (German), AllMovie, Wikipedia (German, French and English) and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 14 April 2024.

Lili Beck

Danish actress Lili Beck or Lili Bech (1883-1939) was the leading lady in many early Swedish films directed by Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström.


Swedish card by Svenska Biografteatern, no. 10. Photo: Ferd Flodin, Stockholm.

Snake Enchantress

Lili Beck in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1883 or 1885 (the sources differ). Her name is often spelt as "Lili Bech".

She received her artistic training in Copenhagen and made her stage debut in 1905 at the Folketeatret. In the same year, she went on tour with the small stage troupe of Jens Trap Walters. In 1910, Bech returned to the Folk Theatre, where she later scored a major success playing Delila in the ancient drama 'Samson and Delilah'. Her debut in the Danish cinema was in the film Morfinisten/The Morphine Takers (1911), directed by Louis Von Kohl and produced by Det Skandinavisk-Russiske Handelshus.

In the flourishing Danish film industry, Bech quickly made her career and advanced to one of the most famous screen actresses of her country. Already in her next film, Taifun/The Typhoon (Louis Von Kohl, 1911) she played the lead. After that Lili would play in four more films by the same company, including Alfred Lind's circus films Den flyvende Cirkus/The Flying Circus (1912) and Bjornetaemmern/The Bear Tamer (1912), in which she played a snake enchantress.

She was mostly seen in family dramas and social melodramas in which she was almost always given leading roles. In 1913 she moved to the Nordisk Film Kompagni where she played in three films by Robert Dinesen (all 1913) and one by August Blom (1914).

In 1913 it was rumoured that Lili Beck would go to the United States and work for the film company Vitagraph. Instead, she started to work for the Swedish company Svenska Biograftheatren.


Lars Hanson. Swedish postcard by Svenska Biografteatern, Stockholm, no. 14. Photo: Ferd. Flodin, Stockholm. Hanson's last name is spelled Hansson on this card.

Sjöström and Stiller

Lili Beck was married shortly to Erik Magnusson in 1912. She remarried Swedish film director Victor Sjöström, in whose debut Trädgardsmästeren/The Gardener (1912) she played opposite Sjöström himself and Gösta Ekman. It was her first Swedish film and Beck would henceforth pursue her career there. Between 1912 and 1916, Lili Beck played in nine films by Sjöström.

Beck also performed in eleven films by director Mauritz Stiller, the discoverer of Greta Garbo. These films include Vampyren/The Vampire (1913) and Vingarne/The Wings (1916), based on Herman Bang's 1902 novel Mikaël.

Vingarne was a very early gay-themed film. The story is that of a conniving countess (played by Lili Beck) coming between a gay sculptor, Claude Zoret (Egil Eide), and his bisexual model and lover, Mikaël (Lars Hanson). The film is also notable for its innovative use of a framing story and telling the plot primarily through the use of flashbacks.

In 1916 she divorced Victor Sjöström. Lili returned to Denmark. With the decline of the Danish cinema after the end of the First World War in 1918 Lili Bech also hardly appeared in front of the camera and concentrated on her stage work again. She remarried for the third time to Danish stage and film actor Hakon Ahnfelt-Ronne. In 1920 she had her comeback as a film actress at the Nordisk company, where she would play in three films by Holger Madsen between 1920 and 1925, and after that in three films by August Blom. She married a fourth time to Martellius Lundquist, whom she divorced in 1933. Lili Beck died in 1939 in Århus, Denmark, aged 53 or 55.

In 1941, a fire in the archives of the Svenska Filmindustri destroyed the negatives and other related material of many of the Swedish films in which Lili Beck starred. Vingarne (1916) was one of the destroyed films. With a script and frame prints on paper film historian Gösta Werner reconstructed the shape of the film and when in 1987 a copy of the central part of the film was found in Oslo, it was possible to reconstruct the film. This version was premiered at the Swedish Film Institute in 1987.


Victor Sjöström. Swedish postcard by Svenska Biografteatern, no. 12. Photo: Ferd. Flodin, Stockholm.

Source: Det Danske Filminstitut (Danish), Richard Dyer/Julianne Pidduck (Now You See It), Wikipedia and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 16 July 2022.