Tala Birell

Austrian actress Tala Birell (1907–1958) was a protégé of legendary stage director Max Reinhardt and became popular in his Viennese productions. Universal signed her to star in Hollywood films and the studio built her up as a new Garbo. To no avail. During the 1940s and early 1950s she mainly worked in B-films and for TV.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 5327/1, 1930-1931. Photo: Manassé, Wien.

Max Reinhardt

Tall and blond Tala Birell was born as Natalie Bierl in Bucharest, Romania in 1907. Her mother Stephanie Sahaydakowska, was a Polish baroness, and her father, Carl Bierl, an Austrian businessman. They were temporarily in Bucharest while he was overseeing his company there.

Nathale and her three sisters and one brother enjoyed an idyllic life, summering at the Polish estate of her aristocratic uncle. During WWI the family was in Berlin, where Nathalie studied at a private school. After the war her father died and her privileged childhood came to an end.

She dreamed of the theatre, and made her stage debut in Berlin in 1926 in The Mikado with Erik Charell.

That year, she also made her film debut credited as Thala Birell in a bit role in Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe/One Does Not Play with Love (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1926), starring Werner Krauss and Lili Damita. This silent German drama was an adaptation of the play On ne badine pas avec l'amour by Alfred de Musset, and is now considered to be a lost film.

The following year she played in Ich habe im Mai von der Liebe geträumt/In May, I dreamed of love (Frans Seitz, 1927) with Wilhelm Dieterle.

She was spotted by the famous stage producer Max Reinhardt, who put her in his production of Es Liegt in Der Luft (It’s in the Air, 1927) starring Marlene Dietrich. Birell was an understudy for Dietrich’s role until Dietrich left the show. Tala then became the star and took the show to Vienna. As a Reinhardt protégé, her reputation grew.

In Austria she played the female lead in the film Die Tat des Andreas Harmer/The act of Andrew Harmer (Alfred Deutsch-German, 1930).

Next, she went to England to appear in the drama Menschen im Käfig/The Love Storm (Ewald André Dupont, 1930) starring Conrad Veidt. This was the German-language version of the British film Cape Forlorn (Ewald André Dupont, 1931).

Then, a Universal executive signed her to come to Hollywood for a part in Liebe auf Befehl (Ernst L. Frank, Johannes Riemann, 1931), the German version of The Boudoir Diplomat (Malcolm St. Clair, 1930) with Betty Compson.

She stayed in Hollywood and Universal gave her a leading role in Doomed Battalion (Cyril Gardner, 1932), the American version of a German mountain film starring Luis Trenker. It was a critical and artistic success and was voted one of the ten best films of 1932 by the New York Times. Next she appeared as a European countess in Nagana (Ernst L. Frank, 1933) opposite Melvyn Douglas.

The studio promoted her as a second Garbo, due to her glamorous, a bit cold beauty. But just as with another European import Anna Sten, the publicity did not work. Garbo was unique.

In the following years Tirell only played small roles for Columbia Pictures in films like The Captain Hates the Sea (Lewis Milestone, 1934). She got the female lead in B-films like the aviation-themed science-fiction film Air Hawks (Albert Rogell, 1935).

She also had supporting parts in A-films like the musical comedy Let's Live Tonight (Victor Schertzinger, 1935) starring Lilian Harvey, Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg, 1935) starring Peter Lorre, and the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938).


British postcard in the Film Weekly Series, London.

Poverty Row

In 1940 Tala Birell appeared onstage in My Dear Children at the Belasco Theatre in New York City.
During the 1940s she continued to appear in B-films like the action film Seven Miles from Alcatraz (Edward Dmytryk, 1942) with Bonita Granville, and One Dangerous Night (Michael Gordon, 1943), the ninth Lone Wolf film featuring Warren William as former jewel thief and reformed detective Michael Lanyard alias The Lone Wolf.

Her most often-seen performance is her brief role as the governess to the Empress's very young son in The Song of Bernadette (Henry King, 1943), who takes what is believed to be miraculous water from the grotto.

Her roles got smaller and she started to work for ‘poverty row’ studios as PRC and Monogram Pictures. For PRC she played in the Science Fiction/Horror movie The Monster Maker (Sam Newfield, 1944) starring J. Carrol Naish, and for Columbia she played in a film of another popular series, the mystery film noir The Power of the Whistler (Lew Landers, 1945) based on the radio drama The Whistler.

Several of her characters were linked with the anti-Nazi war effort: a courageous Russian in China (John Farrow, 1943), Madame Bouchard of the French Resistance in Till We Meet Again (Frank Borzage, 1944), the Nazi Doctor Elise Bork in the serial Jungle Queen (Lewis D. Collins, Ray Taylor, 1945), and Yvette Aubert, the French adventurer and entertainer in Women in the Night (William Rowland, 1948), who plays along with an extreme Nazi unit in Shanghai until she saves the world from a weapon of mass destruction with the sacrifice of her life.

After the war, she also had a small part in the biopic Song of Love (Clarence Brown, 1947) starring Katharine Hepburn as Clara Wieck.

Tirell returned to Germany and took up residence with her mother who was by then living in Munich. In 1951 she was appointed by the Special Service Headquarters of the U.S. Army in Nuremberg to organize theatrical productions in Germany, France, and Austria for the G.I.s. stationed there. Her title was Field Entertainment Supervisor, and sometimes took part herself in shows at military clubs in Munich and Nuremberg, and Orléans (France).

She later moved to Berlin with the title Command Entertainment Director and put on shows for U.S. troops and refugees from Eastern Europe. She retired in 1957 for health reasons.

Her final on-camera appearance was as the Queen of Cygni in an episode of the television series Flash Gordon (1955), based on the characters of the Alex Raymond-created comic strip.

Tala Birell died in 1958 in Landstuhl, Germany, aged 50. She is buried in the Bavarian village Marquartstein in a family tomb.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, no. 774. Photo: Universal.

Sources: L. Paul Meienberg (Films of the Golden Age), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Wikipedia and IMDb.

Maj-Britt Nilsson

Maj-Britt Nilsson (1924-2006) was the first leading lady of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. She featured in three of his films of the early 1950s. Her later film work was pale in comparison, but she had an impressive stage career.


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden/Westf. Photo: Constantin Film. Publicity still for Was die Schwalbe sang/What the swallow sang (Géza von Bolvary, 1956) with Claus Biederstadt.

Ingmar Bergman

Maj-Britt Nilsson was born in Stockholm in 1924. Aged 17, Nilsson got her first uncredited screen role as a schoolgirl in Tänk, om jag gifter mig med prästen/And If I Marry the Pastor (Ivar Johansson, 1941) starring Viveca Lindfors.

Nilsson gained experience in such films as Resan bort/A Journey Away (Alf Sjöberg, 1945). A few years later, she got her first leading parts, in Gustaf Molander's comedy Det är min modell/Affairs of a Model (1946) opposite Alf Kjellin, and the dramatic Maria (Gösta Folke, 1947).

At the same time, she studied at the drama school of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, then under the direction of Mimi Pollak. Nilsson appeared in several plays of the Royal Dramatic Theater.

Her breakthrough came in 1948, when she and Anita Björk starred in a stage production of Jean Genet’s The Maids.

After this triumph Nilsson starred as a young wife of an adulterous orchestra player in the film Till Glädje/To Joy (1950), directed by the then 32 year old Ingmar Bergman. In his excellent obituary on Nilsson in The Guardian, Ronald Bergan wrote that the title of the film "derived from the choral movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that ends the film on a note of hope. In it, as in many later films, Bergman focuses on the female face in close-up, and Nilsson's delicate features admirably bears the scrutiny of Gunnar Fischer's camera."

Bergman’s next film, Sommarlek/Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951), is generally considered as his first mature picture. For the female lead of a ballerina, he chose again the then 27-year-old Nilsson.

Ronald Bergan noted in The Guardian that this film was Bergman’s "first to create the atmosphere of nihilism and stark beauty that would become his trademark. (...) Summer Interlude dealt with adolescent love, the subject of much of Bergman's early work, and had Nilsson looking back on the idyllic summer she had spent several years earlier on an island near Stockholm with the boy she loved. But the affair comes to a tragic end when he dies in an accident. Nilsson, with the looks of a young, dark-haired Ingrid Bergman, brilliantly manages the shift from ecstatic young love to bitterness and emptiness, and then to the expression of a different kind of love."

At Alt Film Guide, Andre Soares cites Ingmar Bergman saying about Nilsson: "she could do anything. She did it instantly and delivered her lines with absolute naturalness."


German postcard by Franz Josef Rüdel Filmpostkartenverlag, Hamburg-Bergedorf, no. W 1654. Photo: Melodie / Herzog-Film / A. Grimm. Publicity still for Sommarflickan/Schwedenmädel/Swedish Girl (Håkan Bergström, Thomas Engel, 1955).


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag G.m.b.H., Minden/Westf., no. 1662. Photo: Melodie / Sandrew / Herzog-Film / A. Grimm. Publicity still for Sommarflickan/Schwedenmädel/Swedish Girl (Håkan Bergström, Thomas Engel, 1955).

Björndal

In her third and last film for Bergman, Kvinnors Väntan/Waiting Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1952), Maj-Britt Nilsson played one of four waiting sisters-in-law - Anita Björk, Eva Dahlbeck, and Aino Taube are the others.

Ronald Bergan notes that the film is “a good example of the director's concern for relations between the sexes, especially from a woman's point of view. While the women of the title wait for their husbands to join them for the summer, three of them recount decisive incidents in their married lives. Nilsson's episode has her in hospital about to go into labour, a situation she has kept from her husband.”

Receiving rave reviews for her work, it was expected that she would become a main staple of Bergman's prestigious company of players. Surprisingly she never made another film for him.

In 1951, after a brief marriage to singer and composer Anders Börje, she had married Per Gerhard, a theatre director and son of Karl Gerhard, a prominent Swedish singer.

She subsequently left the Royal Dramatic Theatre to work alongside him at Stockholm's Vasa Theatre. The couple would stay there for the next three decades. One of her stage roles was that of Maggie the Cat in a Swedish-language version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The films she later made in her career were of far less significance than her early work with Bergman. Among the more interesting ones are the Swedish film noir Vildfåglar/Wild Birds (Alf Sjöberg, 1955) with Per Oscarsson, the Swedish-German coproduction Sommarflickan/Schwedenmädel/Swedish Girl (Håkan Bergström, Thomas Engel, 1955) opposite Karlheinz Böhm, and Hollywood director John Cromwell's last film, A Matter of Morals (1961). The film was made in English in Sweden, with Nilsson carrying on an adulterous affair with her brother-in-law (Patrick O'Neal).

Nilsson seldom strayed outside her homeland when it came to filming outside the rare occasion of the two Austrian films based on the popular trilogy by Trygve Gulbranssen about the Norwegian Björndal family, Und ewig singen die Wälder/Beyond Sing the Woods (Paul May, 1959) and Das Erbe von Björndal/The Heritage of Bjorndal (Gustav Ucicky, 1960).

Her last film appearance was in Bluff Stop (Jonas Cornell, 1977), which featured Björn Andrésen, the boy from Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), by then 22, in his first film after Death in Venice.

She retired completely in 1985. In the 1980s she and her husband took up residence on the French Riviera.

In 2006, Maj-Britt Nilsson died in Cannes, France, aged 82.


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden/Westf., no. 2247. Photo: Berolina / Constantin / Wesel. Publicity still for Was die Schwalbe sang/What the swallow sang (Géza von Bolvary, 1956) with Gunnar Möller.


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag, Minden/Westf. Photo: Constantin Film / Wesel. Publicity still for Was die Schwalbe sang/What the swallow sang (Géza von Bolvary, 1956) with Gunnar Möller.

Sources: Ronald Bergan (The Guardian), Andre Soares (Alt Film Guide), Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.

Marguerite Moreno

Marguerite Moreno (1871-1948) was a famous French stage and screen actress.


French postcard. Editions Cinémagazine, no. 52. Photo: Pathé Consortium Cinema. Marguerite Moreno as Anne d'Autriche in the Dumas adaptation Vingt ans après (Henri Diamant-Berger, 1922).

The Muse of the Symbolists

Marguerite Moreno was born in Paris in 1871. She was the daughter of Pierre Monceau, teacher in mathematics, and Charlotte Lucie Moreno.

Moreno studied in Paris and Bretagne, then entered the Paris Conservatoire, in the class of Gustave Worms. She was engaged by the Comédie-Française in 1890, and acted on stage with the famous names of the French stage: Charles Le Bargy, Mounet-Sully, Julia Bartet, Coquelin sr. and Paul Mounet.

She became the 'muse of the Symbolists', and poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s close friend, but nevertheless she didn’t manage to convince him to stage his Hérodiade. It was Moreno who in 1898 organised his funeral at he church and graveyard of Samoreau près la Seine where he had his country house.

After being the mistress of poet Catulle Mendès (their son would die of meningitis), Moreno married in Britain writer Marcel Schwob in 1900. Unfortunately Schwob fell ill and died in 1905, at the age of 37.

In 1903, Marguerite Moreno left the Comédie-Française and joined the Théâtre de Sarah Bernhardt, and afterwards the Théâtre Antoine.

In 1908 she remarried with actor Jean Daragon. For seven years she ran in Buenos Aires the French section of the Conservatory. When the First World War broke out, she was active at the military hospital in Nice.


French postcard. Photo Saul Boyer, Paris, no. 1/11. Marguerite Moreno in La Sorcière at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, Paris. Moreno performed in this play by Victorien Sardou in 1903.

Ringed eyes and a rosebud mouth

From 1915, Marguerite Moreno discovered the cinema. In the silent era she played together with her second husband Jean Daragon in Vingt ans après (1922) by Henri Diamant-Berger.

Vingt ans après/Twenty Years After (1922) was the sequel to Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921), the first film version of Alexandre Dumas, père's novel The Three Musketeers. Both films were directed by Diamant-Berger.

Moreno impersonated Queen Anne of Austria “under a plaster-like make-up, with ringed eyes, and a rosebud mouth”, as Olivier Barrot and Raymond Chirat wrote in Noir & Blanc: 250 acteurs du cinéma français 1930-1960 (2000).

Daragon played Beaufort in Vingt ans après, but it was to be his last film. A year later, in 1923, he died.

Moreno acted in several other films by Diamant-Berger: Paris pendant la guerre (1916), Le Mauvais garçon (1923), opposite Maurice Chevalier in Gonzague (1923), L'Accordeur (1923) and L'Emprise (1924), starring Pierre de Guingand and Pierrette Madd.

In the late 1920s she also acted in films like Le Capitaine Fracasse by Alberto Cavalcanti (1929), starring Pierre Blanchar and Lien Deyers.


French postcard by Editions Cinémagazine, no. 60. Photo: Pathé Consortium Cinema. Jean Daragon as De Beaufort in the Dumas adaptation Vingt ans après (Henri Diamant-Berger, 1922).

Countesses, duchesses and queens

When sound cinema arrived in France, Moreno had an enormous increase in film roles. In 1930-1932 she played at least one film part each month, a number which slowly went down in the course of the 1930s.

On instigation of her friend and soulmate, the writer Colette, Moreno started playing comedy, and in 1920, she had had a big success on stage with Le Sexe faible by Édouard Bourdet. Here she played “an old Slavic countess who hires beautiful boys to pass boredom”, as Maurice Martin du Gard mentioned in his Carte rouge (1930).

Moreno repeated the part in the adaptation filmed by Robert Siodmak in 1933 and starring Victor Boucher. Moreno often played countesses, duchesses and queens, though she included the lower classes as well.

In the interbellum years Moreno installed herself in a an estate at the Lot province. It was renovated by her cousin, actor Pierre Moreno, who lived and acted with her and was her lover too.

Moreno spread her career between the stage and the screen, and according to Barrot and Chirat, “she accepted all that was offered her. The average spectator’s laugh at each of her performances was enough for her.”

She appeared e.g. in Un trou dans le mur (1930) by René Barberis, Tout va très bien madame la marquise (1936) by Henry Wulschleger, and La Fessée (1937) by Pierre Caron.

However, Moreno was also directed by Raymond Bernard in Les Misérables (1934), where she and Charles Dullin played the evil couple Thenardier opposite Harry Baur as Jean Valjean.

She played again aristocrats in Jean Delannoy's Paris-Deauville (1933) and in La dame de pique (1937) by Fedor Ozep.

She did various parts in films by Sacha Guitry: Faisons un rêve, Le Roman d'un tricheur and Le Mot de Cambronne in 1936, Les Perles de la couronne in 1937, Ils étaient neuf célibataires in 1939, and Donne-moi tes yeux in 1943.


French postcard, no. 559. Collection: Didier Hanson.

You cannot be ugly with such an expressive face

Marguerite Moreno worked with several interesting film directors.

With Marcel Pagnol she played in Regain (1937) starring Fernandel, and the uncompleted film La Prière aux étoiles (1941).

With Christian-Jaque she made Carmen (1942) and Un revenant (1946) with Louis Jouvet, and with Claude Autant-Lara she acted in Douce (1943).

In 1945, Marguerite Moreno was a giant succes on stage as Aurélie in La Folle de Chaillot, written for her by Jean Giraudoux.

Marguerite Moreno died in Touzac (Lot) on 14 July 1948. Her last film, L'assassin est à l'écoute (Raoul André, 1948), was released a few weeks after her death.

Her house and estate La Source bleue (The Blue Source) in Touzac was transformed in an inn by her heirs.

Paul Valéry consided her the only one capable to recite poems, so he invited her to recite them during his courses at the Collège de France.

Paul Léautaud wrote on her: “Tonight while listening to Moreno in Aricie, I was crying softly…” and “People say she is ugly, but you cannot be ugly with such an expressive face, and so delicate at the same time – her eyes, her nose, her mouth are so full of wit. Moreover, she has it in such a way as seldom to be found in a woman. She is female malice and satire embodied.”

The Marguerite Moreno Papers were purchased by Yale University in 2009.

Sources: Wikipedia (French) and IMDb.

Roland Verhavert (1927-2014)

Om Friday 26 July 2014, Belgian film director Roland Verhavert passed away. He directed 44 films between 1955 and 1993. In 1955, he had his breakthrough when he co-directed the film Meeuwen sterven in de haven/Seagulls Die in the Harbour (1955), which was entered into the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. In 1974, his film De loteling/The Conscript (1973) was entered into the 24th Berlin International Film Festival. Verhavert died of a heart attack, aged 87.


Belgian postcard by Ed. Prevot, Antwerp. Photo: Metropool Film. Publicity still for Meeuwen sterven in de haven/Seagulls Die in the Harbour (1955) with Julien Schoenaerts.

Seagulls die in the harbour

Meeuwen sterven in de haven/Seagulls die in the harbour/Les mouettes meurent au port (1955) was a Belgian thriller, directed by Roland Verhavert, Rik Kuypers and Ivo Michiels, who also wrote the script.

It starred Julien Schoenaerts as the stranger and Dora van der Groen as a prostitute, but also the city itself played an important part.

The story deals with a tormented, nameless man, on the run after the murder on his wife, ending up in harbour town Antwerp. He is only understood by a little orphan and two women who want to help him, but then others force him to kidnap the child.

The film meant the film debut of Schoenaerts and was also the breakthrough for Van der Groen as film actress. Because of its theme and its expressionist style, the film reminds of The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) and On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954).

Meeuwen sterven in de haven/Seagulls Die in the Harbour was well received nationally and internationally, and was selected for festivals like Cannes, where it was even nominated for a Golden Palm.

After being shown at the Belgian Week in Moscow, the film was sold to the Soviet Union where it became a hit.

In Belgium it was praised for its fresh look and - in contrast to the usual local comedies - its international appeal. Flemish critics hailed it as the first Flemish film, others even as the first Belgian one.


Belgian postcard by Ed. Prevot, Antwerp. Photo: Metropool Film. Publicity still for Meeuwen sterven in de haven/Seagulls Die in the Harbour (1955) with Dora van der Groen.

Source: Wikipedia (Dutch, French and English) and IMDb.

Oskar Werner

Talented Austrian actor Oskar Werner (1922-1984) was Jules in François Truffaut’s Nouvelle Vague classic Jules et Jim (1962). He is also known for international films like Ship of Fools (1965), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968). Werner received an Academy Award nomination and won a Golden Globe Award in 1966.


East-German postcard by VEB Progress Filmvertrieb, Berlin, no. 12/80, 1979. Photo: publicity still for Voyage of the Damned (Stuart Rosenberg, 1976).

Decision Before Dawn

Oskar Werner or Oscar Werner was born Oskar Josef Schließmayer in Vienna, Austria in 1922.

His parents divorced when he was fairly young. Oskar spent much of his childhood in the care of his grandmother, who entertained him with stories about the Burgtheater, the Austrian state theatre.

Performing in school plays also aroused a deep desire to act. His father (Wikipedia) or his uncle (IMDb) helped him to get parts as an extra in films like Geld fällt vom Himmel/Money falls from the sky (Heinz Helbig, 1938) and Hotel Sacher (Erich Engel, 1939).

He decided to drop out of high school in order to pursue acting roles. In 1940, director Lothar Müthel accepted the then eighteen years old as a member of the Burgtheater. Oskar was the youngest person ever to receive this recognition.

He made his theatre debut using the stage name Oskar Werner in October 1941. Two months later, Werner was drafted into the Wehrmacht.

As a pacifist and staunch opponent of National Socialism, he was determined to avoid advancement in the military. He finagled his way into KP duty feigning incompetence and was assigned to peeling potatoes and cleaning latrines instead of being sent to the Eastern Front.

In 1944, he secretly married actress Elisabeth Kallina, who was half-Jewish. They immediately had a daughter, Eleanore. That December, he deserted the Wehrmacht and fled with his wife and daughter to the Wienerwald, where they remained in hiding until the end of the war.

Werner returned to the Burgtheater, and also acted in productions at the Raimund Theater and the Theater in der Josefstadt, frequently playing character roles.

He made his film debut in Der Engel mit der Posaune/The angel with the trumpet (Karl Hartl, 1948). The following year he portrayed Ludwig van Beethoven's nephew Karl in Eroica (Walter Kolm-Veltée, 1949).

In 1950, Werner journeyed to the United Kingdom to reprise the role he had played in Der Engel mit der Posaune in its English-language version, The Angel with the Trumpet, under the direction of Anthony Bushell.

He and his wife divorced at about this time but remained friends.

He appeared in a few more German–Austrian films before going to Hollywood for a lead role as a German prisoner of war in the war film Decision Before Dawn (Anatole Litvak, 1951) opposite Richard Baseheart. The 20th Century Fox production was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Film Editing and Best Picture.

Werner was ripe for film stardom, but the subsequent roles promised by the studio failed to materialize. Hurt and disappointed, he returned to Europe and settled in Triesen, Liechtenstein, in a home he designed and built with a friend.

He returned to the stage and during the 1950’s he performed in Hamlet, Danton's Death, Henry IV, Henry V, Torquato Tasso, and Becket, among others.

In 1954 he married Anne Power, the daughter of French actress Annabella and adopted daughter of Tyrone Power.

After a period of inactivity in the cinema, Werner appeared in five films in 1955. Among them were the war drama Der letzte Akt/The Last Ten Days (Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1955) about Hitler’s last ten days, Mozart/The Life and Loves of Mozart (Karl Hartl, 1955), in which he played the title role, and Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955) as a student opposite Martine Carol.

Gary Brumburgh describes him at IMDb as “An aloof, handsome blond with wide-set, hooded eyes and quietly solemn features”. Despite his good looks and obvious talent, it would take seven more years before he began to draw critical acclaim and international recognition in the cinema.


German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag G.m.b.H. Minden/Westf., no. 1719. Photo: Gamma / Union / Vogelmann. Publicity still for Lola Montez (Max Ophüls, 1955) with Martine Carol and Ivan Desny.


Jeanne Moreau. French postcard by Editions P.I., Paris, no. 1017. Photo: Sam Lévin.

Jules et Jim

In 1962, Oskar Werner's final breakthrough came with the French film Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (François Truffaut, 1962) based on Henri-Pierre Roché's semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund.

Werner became an international sensation as the highly romantic and intellectual Austrian Jules who falls in love with the same woman, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), as his best friend Jim (Henri Serre).

Jules et Jim is one of the seminal products of the Nouvelle Vague, the French New Wave. Wikipedia describes it as “an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor).”

Werner's then portrayed the philosophical Dr. Schumann in Ship of Fools (Stanley Kramer 1965), which recounts the overlapping stories of several passengers aboard an ocean liner bound to Germany from Mexico in 1933. His role won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor.

His portrayal of Jewish East German spy Fiedler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) won him another Golden Globe Award and his second BAFTA nomination. Gary Brumburgh calls Werner’s acting style “remote, rather morose and, as a result, intriguing“.

In 1966, he played book-burning fireman Guy Montag in François Truffaut's film adaptation of the cult-classic Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The relationship with Truffaut was irreparably damaged over artistic differences while filming. The unhappiness of that film experience triggered an already burgeoning drinking problem and the decline of his career.

Werner next played an orchestra conductor in the British drama Interlude (Kevin Billington, 1968) and a Vatican priest loosely based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the American drama The Shoes of the Fisherman (Michael Anderson, 1968).

That same year he divorced Power and put his film career on a hold. He returned to the stage and spent time travelling in Israel, Italy, Malta, France, and the United States.

He appeared in an episode of the TV series Columbo (Bernard L. Kowalski, 1975) featuring Peter Falk, and the following year he made his final screen appearance in Voyage of the Damned (Stuart Rosenberg, 1976) as Faye Dunaway’s Jewish husband.

The story was inspired by true events concerning the fate of the MS St. Louis ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees from Germany to Cuba in 1939. For his part he received another Golden Globe nomination.

Werner was an alcoholic, which was a deciding factor in the decline of his health and career. He lived most of the time retired in his house in Liechtenstein. His last stage appearance was in a 1983 production of The Prince of Homburg, and his last public appearance was at the Mozart Hall in Salzburg ten days prior to his death.

On 22 October 1984, Werner cancelled a reading at the Hotel Europäischer Hof in Marburg because he was feeling ill. He was found dead of a heart attack the following morning, only two days after François Truffaut had died.

Oskar Werner was 61. He is buried in his adopted country of Liechtenstein.

He had two children, his daughter Elinore (1944) with Elisabeth Kallina, and son Felix (1966) with the American model Diane Anderson.


Trailer Decision Before Dawn (1951). Source: UmbrellaEntAU (YouTube).


Trailer Jules et Jim/Jules and Jim (1962). Source: UmbrellaEntAU (YouTube).

Sources: Gary Brumburgh (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

Franciska Gaál

Hungarian cabaret artist and stage actress Franciska Gaál (1904-1973) starred in several European comedies of the 1920s and 1930s. Later she went to Hollywood to star in Cecil B. DeMille's The Buccaneer (1938), and other films.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 7612/1, 1932-1933. Photo: Angelo Photos.


Dutch postcard, no. 618. Photo: Filma. Franziska Gaal and Wolf Albach-Retty in Frühjahrsparade/Spring Parade (Géza von Bolváry, 1934).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 9054/1, 1935-1936. Photo: Rota.


French postcard in the Entr'acte series by Éditions Asphodèle, Mâcon, no. 003/15. Photo: Collection B. Courtel / D.R. Cecil B. DeMille, Fredric March, and Franziska Gaál (in the US written as Franciska Gaal) on the set of The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille, 1938). Caption: Cecil B. DeMille directs with his inseparable cinematographer Victor Milner, the stars of the film Fredric March and Franciska Gaal.

Comic timing

Franciska Gaál (in Germany Franziska Gaal) was born Fanny Silberstein or Zilverstrich (according to Filmportal.de, while other sources also write Zilveritch or Silberspitz) in Budapest in 1904. She was the thirteenth child of an affluent Jewish middle-class family.

Fanny attended the Budapest Academy of Theatre and after the First World War, she made a name as a singer, dancer and actress. Her stage name Gaál was the name of one of her acting teachers. Her screen debut in Hungary was the short silent film Az Egér/The Mouse (Lajos Gellért, 1921). Two other silent films followed, A cornevillei harangok/The Bells of Corneville (Antal Forgács, 1921) and New-York express kábel/New York Express Cable (Márton Garas, 1921).

But after these films, she focused on the stage. Several plays were written especially for her, including 'A jó tündér' (The Good Fairy, 1930) and 'Valaki' (Violet, 1931) by Ferenc Molnár. She was thus a highly successful stage actress when producer Joe Pasternak engaged her for Universal's European subsidiary Deutsche Universal.

She started with Paprika (Carl Boese, 1932) opposite Paul Hörbiger, and went on to star in several features which highlighted her comic timing and enchanting looks.

To her German films belong Gruss und Kuss, Veronika!/Greetings and Kisses, Veronika (Carl Boese, 1933) and Frühjahrsparade/Spring Parade (Géza von Bolváry, 1934), also starring Wolf Albach-Retty, Paul Hörbiger, Theo Lingen, Adele Sandrock and Hans Moser. Producer Pasternak later remade Frühjahrsparade/Spring Parade in Hollywood as a Deanna Durbin vehicle.


Hungarian postcard. Publisher: Globus, Budapest. Photo: Angelo Photos. Collection: Didier Hanson.


Dutch postcard by M.B. & Z. Photo: Filma. Publicity card for Skandal in Budapest/Romance in Budapest (Steve/Stefan Szekely, Géza von Bolváry, 1933).


Dutch postcard, no. 527. Photo: Filma. Franziska Gaal in Skandal in Budapest/Romance in Budapest (Steve/Stefan Szekely, Geza von Bolvary, 1933).


Dutch postcard by Filma, no. 530. Franziska Gaal in Skandal in Budapest/Romance in Budapest (Steve/Stefan Szekely, Geza von Bolvary, 1933).

Modern and witty Screwball Comedies

After the Nazis' rise to power, the Jewish Gaal couldn't continue her work in Germany. Between 1934 and 1936, she became the star of several independently produced films in Austria, which marked the height of her career.

Peter (1934) with Hans Jaray, Kleine Mutti/Little Mother (1935) with Enrico Benfer and Otto Wallburg, and Katharina – die Letzte/Catherine the Last (1936) had the same successful formula - light musical comedies built around the young soprano Gaal.

These modern and witty screwball comedies were all directed by Hermann Kosterlitz (later Henry Koster), written by Felix Joachimson and produced by Joe Pasternak for Universal Pictures in Europe. The rights of Kleine Mutti were later acquired by RKO who remade it in English as Bachelor Mother (Garson Kanin, 1939) starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven.

Her final Austrian film was Fräulein Lilli/Miss Lilli (1936) with the Jewish actors Hans Jaray and Szöke Szakall as her co-stars. In order not to make his production company Projektograph Film a target for anti-Semitic fanatics, producer Oskar Glück founded especially for this production Opus Film GmbH.

As a director, he contracted German emigrant Hans Behrendt. The shooting was turbulent and according to German Wikipedia the role of diva Gaál with her 'stormy temperament' was 'unfortunate'. She refused to work with Behrendt, nor with a second emigrant director Max Neufeld. So the film was finished by a third Jewish director, Robert Wohlmuth. Nazi Germany banned the film, and also after the war the film was not a success.


Dutch postcard by City Film, no. 503.


Dutch postcard by City Film, no. 587. Publicity still for Gruss und Kuss - Veronika (1933) with Paul Hörbiger.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 9055/1. The photo is a still from Frühjahrsparade (1934), with Wolf Albach-Retty. The photo was cut out of the card by a former owner. We photoshopped the edges.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. A 1462/1, 1937-1938. Photo: Paramount. Franziska Gaal in The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille, 1938).

Impoverished and unnoticed

In 1937, Franciska Gaál and the rest of the Universal team left Austria and emigrated to the USA. There she was groomed to become a Hollywood star by Cecil B. DeMille. Gaál co-starred in his epic adventure film The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille, 1938) opposite Frederic March, but her performance was merely decorative according to critics.

Next, she appeared at Bing Crosby's side in the musical Paris Honeymoon (Frank Tuttle, 1939), but again to no avail. The last of her three Hollywood screen appearances was in MGM's Cinderella comedy The Girl Downstairs (Norman Taurog, 1939). She starred as a scullery maid, romanced by callous playboy Franchot Tone.

In 1940, Franciska Gaál returned to Budapest to attend to her mother's illness and was then forced to remain in Hungary through WW II. She survived the war and Nazi prosecution, hidden in a bombed-out estate.

After the war, she tried to make a comeback opposite Theo Lingen and Hans Moser in Renée XIV (Ákos Ráthonyi, 1946), but the film was never completed. In 1947, she returned to the US and replaced Eva Gabor in the Broadway production 'The Happy Time' (1951). However, she didn't surface again as an actress.

Later, she worked as an acting teacher at the theatre school of Erwin Piscator. Franciska Gaál was married to Dr. Francis Dajkovitch, who passed away in 1965. In 1972, the former star of the German sound comedy died in New York, impoverished and unnoticed by the public.


Austrian postcard no. A.E. 59. Caricature by Kora. Collection: Marlene Pilaete.


British postcard in the Film Partners Series, London, no. P 243. Photo: Paramount. Fredric March and Franciska Gaal in The Buccaneer (Cecil B. DeMille, 1938).


Vintage postcard by EmBPo, no. 3175. Photo: Polarfilma.


British postcard in the Picturegoer Series, London, no. 1197. Photo: Paramount.

Sources: The West Australian (Trove), Filmportal.de, Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), AllMovie, Wikipedia (English and German) and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 24 April 2024.

Olga Baclanova

Russian actress Olga Baclanova (1896-1974) achieved prominence during the silent film era and was billed as the ‘Russian Tigress’. The statuesque blonde is best known now as the trapeze artist Cleopatra in the horror classic Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932), which also features a cast of actual carnival sideshow performers.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3946, 1928-1929. Photo: Paramount. Publicity still for The Docks of New York (Josef von Sternberg, 1928). Collection: Didier Hanson.

Worthy Artist of the Republic

Ólga Vladímirovna Baclanova (Russian: О́льга Влади́мировна Бакла́нова) was born in Moscow in the Russian Empire in 1896. Baclanova was one of the six children of Vladimir Baclanoff and his wife Alexandra, who was an actress in early Russian films.

Baclanova studied drama at the Cherniavsky Institute before being accepted into the prestigious Moscow Art Theatre (M.A.T.) in 1912.

During her apprenticeship she would often spend the summers in the Crimea, where unbeknownst to the directors of the M.A.T., Stanislavsky and Nemirovitch-Danchenko, many students including Olga were appearing, in one- or two-reel silent films, like the Alexander Pushkin adaptation Simfoniya lyubvi i smerti/Mozart and Salieri (Viktor Tourjansky (as Viktor Turzhansky), S. Yurev, 1914), Zhenshchina vampire/The Vampire Woman (Viktor Tourjansky, 1915) and Tot, kto poluchaet poshchechiny/He Who Gets Slapped (Aleksandr Ivanov-Gai, I. Schmidt, 1916).

Her films of this period may not be totally documented, but it seems that she starred or appeared in at least a dozen and a half films, bringing her into contact with directors and actors like Viktor Tourjansky, Richard Boleslawski, Maria Ouspenskaya and Michael Chekhov.

By 1917 Olga was appearing in the M.A.T. Parent Company Productions of works by Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, and in the M.A.T. first studio productions of works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Ludwig Berger.

During the upheaval of the fall of the Czar, her father was murdered, and the family was confined to one room of their mansion. For sake of convenience, Olga married a lawyer named Vlademar Zoppi in 1922.

She had previously made the first communist agitprop film, Khleb/Bread (Richard Boleslawski, Boris Sushkevich, 1918) and as Paul Meienberg writes at his site dedicated to Olga Baclanova, she “knew her survival depended on her complicity with the New Regime's demands. Her mentor, Nemirovitch-Danchenko decided to form a new studio at M.A.T., the Musical Studio, which would present classical works with avant-garde staging.

Between 1920 and 1925 Olga would be the jewel around which five large-scale productions were staged. To prepare for this, she studied dance and voice with the great talents available at the M.A.T. In early 1925, Baclanova was given the highest award a Soviet artist could receive: ‘Worthy Artist of the Republic’ and she was highly praised for her contributions.”


French postcard by A.N., Paris, no. 387. Photo: Paramount, 1930.


Vintage card. Photo: Paramount.

Freaks

In 1925, Olga Baclanova went to New York with the 1925 touring production of the Moscow Art Theatre's Lysistrata. Though the rest of the company returned to Russia in 1926, she stayed to pursue a career in the United States.

Baclanova quickly established herself as a popular actress in American silent movies and achieved a notable success with her part as George Bancroft’s wife in Josef von Sternberg’s masterpiece, The Docks of New York (1928).

Meanwhile, Paramount cast her opposite Emil Jannings in Street of Sin (1928), the final American film of Scandinavian director Mauritz Stiller.

By the spring of 1928, Paramount offered Olga a five-year contract. That year, she appeared in another silent classic, The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, 1928). She played Duchess Josiana, the femme fatale love interest to Conrad Veidt's disfigured hero.

In 1929, she finally received a divorce from her first husband in Russia and she married her fiancé, Nicholas Soussanin, a Russian actor whose minor career dwindled from bits to uncredited parts over a fifteen-year period.

Olga however was a star and she was billed as the ‘Russian Tigress’. The birth of her second son was front page news in 1930.

The introduction of sound film proved difficult for Baclanova, and her stagey mannerisms and heavy Russian accent relegated her to supporting roles.

Her film career was in decline when MGM offered her the role of the evil circus performer Cleopatra in Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932). Director Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow ‘freaks’, rather than using costumes and makeup. The physically deformed ‘freaks’ are inherently trusting and honourable people, while the real monsters are two of the ‘normal’ circus members who conspire to murder a midget to obtain his large inheritance.

Freaks was highly controversial and screened only briefly before being withdrawn. It would be 30 years before this curious horror film gained a cult following in midnight movie screenings. Freaks did not revive Baclanova's film career.

In early 1933 she left Hollywood and her husband Soussanin behind and headed for New York. Till 1943 Boclanova starred in various Broadway productions and then toured in road companies of Cat And The Fiddle, Twentieth Century, Grand Hotel and Idiot's Delight. She debuted on the London stage in 1936 in Going Places. Baclanova also hosted a radio show in the late 1930s.

In 1939, she married Richard Davies, a Russian with an anglicised name, who owned the Fine Arts Theatre in New York. One last big role as a flamboyant, worldly opera singer in the Broadway hit Claudia kept her busy for two years (1941-1943). She returned to Hollywood in 1943 to recreate her stage role in Claudia (Edmund Goulding, 1943).

After some more summer stock and occasional night club appearances, she retired in 1948. Olga Baclanova settled in Vevey, Switzerland, where she died in a rest home in 1974.

In 1994, Freaks was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 4128/1, 1929-1930. Photo: Paramount.


French postcard by Cinémagazine-Edition, Paris, no. 620. Photo: Paramount.

Sources: Paul Meienberg (Olga Baclanova.com), AllMovie, Wikipedia and IMDb.

Jason Connery

British actor Jason Connery (1963) is the son of actors Sean Connery and Diane Cilento. He had his breakthrough role as Robin Hood in the TV series Robin of Sherwood (1986). Since then, Connery appeared in over 30 films, television movies and series, and nowadays he also works as a film director and producer.


German collectors card by Bravo.


British postcard by Santoro Graphics, London, no. BW 136. Photo: Paul Cox / Idols.

A plausible philandering wastrel

Jason Joseph Connery was born in Rome, Italy and was raised in London. His parents are the film actors Sean Connery and Diane Cilento. Connery attended the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Next, he performed many roles in the theatre and subsequently had parts in several films.

His film debut was in The Lords of Discipline (Franc Roddam, 1983), set in a military academy. In the Australian film The Boy Who Had Everything (Stephen Wallace, 1984) he co-starred with his mother Diane Cilento as a university student and his alcoholic mother. The title of the film provided ammunition for those jaundiced critics who assumed that Jason's career was merely a by-product of his parents' fame. In fact, Jason was talented enough to carve out a career without his lofty pedigree. On TV, he appeared in the Doctor Who serial Vengeance on Varos (Ron Jones, 1985).

The following year, he replaced Michael Praed as Robin Hood in the final season of the television series Robin of Sherwood (1986). The series combined a gritty, authentic production design with elements of real-life history, 20th-century fiction, and pagan myth. Robin of Sherwood is also notable for its haunting title music by Clannad and Connery became well known in the UK for this role. Ten years earlier, his father had played the same role in the film Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976) with Audrey Hepburn.

In Italy, Jason Connery co-starred with Laura Antonelli in the erotic film La venexiana/The Venetian Woman (Mauro Bolognini, 1986). The film is a transposition of the anonymous 16th-century comedy play with the same name. Other Italian productions were the TV movie Il Treno di Lenin/Lenin… the Train (Damiano Damiani, 1988) with Ben Kingsley, and the war film Casablanca Express (Sergio Martino, 1989), about a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill. His co-star in this film was Francesco Quinn, the son of Anthony Quinn.

Connery then portrayed Ian Fleming in the television drama Spymaker: The Secret Life of Ian Fleming (Ferdinand Fairfax, 1990) with Kristin Scott Thomas. Fleming was the creator of the James Bond character, which had made Sean Connery into an icon. Bob Highland at IMDb: “The choice of Jason Connery as the eponymous hero was certainly an exercise in the bleeding obvious, and transparently the casting decision of a cynical producer seeking a large audience of the curious, but Connery was arguably the perfect actor for the role. No doubt his looks owe more to the young Bond than the young Fleming, but he makes a plausible philandering wastrel from the British upper classes”. There followed more roles in TV films, such as Mountain of Diamonds (Jeannot Szwarc, 1991) with Derek de Lint, the drama Jamila (Monika Teuber, 1994) and the fantasy film Merlin: The Quest Begins (David Winning, 1997).


British postcard by Statics, London, no. PC 101.


British postcard by Statics, London, no. PC 102. Photo: Brent Walker.

Another direction

In 1996, Jason Connery married American actress Mia Sara, whom he had met during the making of Bullet to Beijing (George Mihalka, 1995) in Russia. They have a son, Dashiell Quinn Connery (1997), but the couple divorced in 2002. In the new century, Connery starred mainly in B-films and TV productions. A notable exception was a supporting role in the popular Western comedy Shanghai Noon (Tom Dey, 2000) starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson.

Since then, he had starring roles in such feature films as the fantasy horror Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (Chris Angel, 2001), Requiem (Jon Kirby, Mitchell Morgan, 2001), and Private Moments (Jag Mundhra, 2005). On television, he guest-starred in popular series like Smallville (2001-2003) with Tom Welling, and he starred as a main character in two series of the children's show Shoebox Zoo (2004–2005). He also toured with a stage production of 'The Blue Room' (2003).

He continued to play lead roles in undistinguished films such as Night Skies (Roy Knyrim, 2006), Lightspeed (Don E. FauntLeRoy, 2006) and Brotherhood of Blood (Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer. 2007). He also worked as a voice actor for an animation series. At the moment his acting career seemed to go nowhere, so he chose another direction. In 2008, he made his directorial debut with the action-thriller Pandemic (Jason Connery, 2008) starring Ray Wise.

Since his directional debut, he directed three more B-films The Devil's Tomb (2009) starring Cuba Gooding Jr, 51 (2011) and The Philly Kid (2012). At IMDb, the latter, an actioner about cage fighting, got positive reviews. Gradyharp: “The Philly Kid is a low-budget little pertinent drama that for the genre is better than the usual. Written by Adam Mervis (who also acts the role of the main character's understanding parole officer) and directed with fine pacing by Jason Connery, the movie somehow catches fire - likely due to a cast of up-and-coming young actors.”

Connery combines directing with producing and acting. In 2013, he guest starred in the TV soap General Hospital and the following year, he played in the film Butterfly (Robert Benavides Jr., 2014). As an associate producer, he worked on a romantic drama, For You (Paul James McDonnell, 2015). In 2016, he directed Tommy's Honor (2016), a film celebrating the lives of golf pioneers Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris. The film won Best Feature Film at the 2016 British Academy Scotland Awards. In 2021, Jason Connery married Fiona Ufton, his girlfriend of five years.


British postcard by Reflex Marketing Ltd., Wellingborough, no. PC 174, 1986. Photo: Paul Cox / Idols.

Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Angela Garcia (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 21 October 2023.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell

British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865-1940) was by far the biggest name on the London stage of the belle époque, famous for her wit, temperament and beauty. She was the original Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion (1914) a part written especially for her by her lifelong friend George Bernard Shaw. In her later years, ‘Mrs. Pat’ made notable film appearances as a dowager in One More River (1934) and in Crime and Punishment (1935).


British postcard by Rotary, no. 359 A. Photo: W. & D. Downey, London.


British postcard in the Glosso-graphs series by Misch & Co., no. 4008/2. Photo: Dover Street Studios.

Juliet, Ophelia and Lady Macbeth

Mrs. Patrick Campbell was born Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner in Kensington, London, in 1865. Her parents were John Tanner and Maria Luigia Giovanna, daughter of Count Angelo Romanini. She studied for a short time at the Guildhall School of Music. She was well-known as an amateur before she made her stage debut in 1888 at the Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, four years after her marriage to Patrick Campbell.

In March 1890, she appeared in London at the Adelphi, where she afterwards played again in 1891–1893. She became successful as a result of starring in Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's play, 'The Second Mrs Tanqueray', in 1893, at St. James's Theatre where she also appeared in 1894 in 'The Masqueraders'.

As Kate Cloud in John-a-Dreams, produced by Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket in 1894, she made another success, and again as Agnes in 'The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith' at the Garrick (1895). Among her other performances were those in 'Fédora' (1895), 'Little Eyolf' (1896), and her notable performances with Johnston Forbes-Robertson at the Lyceum in the roles of Juliet in 'Romeo and Juliet', Ophelia in 'Hamlet', and Lady Macbeth (1895–1898) in 'Macbeth'.

In 1994 she married Patrick Campbell, and they had two children, Alan Urquhart ('Beo'), who was killed in WWI, and Stella, who married an American and moved to Chicago. Campbell’s own marriage ended with the death of her husband in the Boer War in 1900.

Fourteen years later, she became the second wife of Major George Frederick Myddleton Cornwallis-West, a dashing writer and soldier previously married to Jennie Jerome, the mother of Sir Winston Churchill.


British postcard by Langlier.


British postcard by The Biograph Studio, London. Sent by mail in 1902.

A grand sense of humour and outstanding charm

In 1902, Mrs. Patrick Campbell made her debut performance on Broadway in New York in Hermann Sudermann's 'Magda', a marked success.

Subsequent Broadway roles included 'The Joy of Living' (1902), as Melisande to the Pelleas of Sarah Bernhardt in Maurice Maeterlinck’s 'Pelléas et Mélisande' (1904), as Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen’s play of the same name (1907), 'The Thunderbolt' (1908), 'Lady Patricia' (1911), and 'Bella Donna' (1911).

She would return to perform there on a number of occasions until 1930. She was described by one American producer as a temperamental actress whose "grand sense of humour and outstanding charm made you laugh instead of strangle her". One of her most famous quotes was " It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

In 1914, she played Eliza Doolittle in the original production of George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion'; though much too old for the part at 49, she was the obvious choice, being by far the biggest name on the London stage, and Shaw would have seen it no other way since he wrote the play for her in particular. She and Shaw conducted a famous correspondence for many years.

Despite her second marriage, to George Cornwallis-West, she continued to use the stage name Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Her last stage appearance came in 1933.


British postcard. Sent by mail in 1905.


British postcard by Rotophot, no. 9194. Photo: Stereoscopic Co.

Astonishingly inappropriate remarks

Mrs. Patrick Campbell made her film début in the silent British film The Money Moon (Fred Paul, 1920). When the sound film came along, she went to Hollywood and appeared in The Dancers (Chandler Sprague, 1930) with Lois Moran and Mae Clarke.

She also became a speech teacher and dialogue coach and made instructional films for aspiring actors who wanted to break into sound film.

Campbell herself made some notable film appearances, including Riptide (Edmund Goulding, 1934) starring Norma Shearer, One More River (James Whale, 1934) with Diana Wynyard, and as the villainous pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg, 1935) featuring Peter Lorre.

She was legendary for making astonishingly inappropriate remarks. She undoubtedly lost her chance for a career in Hollywood when, at a party, she approached MGM executive Irving Thalberg, married to Norma Shearer, and said: "Dear Mr. Thalberg, how is your lovely, lovely wife with the tiny, tiny eyes?".

Mrs. Patrick Campbell died in 1940 in Pau, France, at age 75. The onset of WW II had caught her in the French Pyrenees, ill and destitute. She could not return to England because quarantine laws would have imprisoned her Pekinese, Moonbeam. Her nurse cabled Sara and Gerald Murphy for funds, which were sent but arrived too late and were used to bury the former diva in the Cimetiere Urbain at Pau.


British postcard by Rotophot, no. 9163. Photo: Stereoscopic Co.


British postcard in the National series by Millar & Lang Art Publishers, Glasgow and London. Photo: Lafayette.


George Alexander, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Rosalie Toller and Allan Aynesworth in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Sources: Hans J. Wollstein (AllMovie), Harry Rusche (Shakespeare’s World), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 28 August 2023.