Molly Wessely

Molly Wessely (1889-1963) was a German stage and screen actress and operetta singer. Between 1914 and 1920, she appeared in seven or eight silent films.


German postcard by Photochemie, no. K. 287.


German postcard by NPG (Neue Photographische Gesellschaft), no. 260. Photo: Alex Binder, Berlin.


German postcard by Verlag Hermann Leiser, Berlin-Wilm., no. 3203. Photo: B.I.G. Molly Wessely in 'Die Rose von Stambul' (1917).

Film Operettas

Molly Wessely also Molly Wesely was born in 1889 as Margarete Franziska Veselý in Berlin. Margarete was the youngest of six daughters of master plumber Lambert Veselý and his wife Johanna, née Sedlacek. Her parents came from Bohemia.

She began her stage career in 1909 with an engagement at the Gebrüder-Herrnfeld-Theater. After a stopover at the Residenz-Theater, she joined the Metropol-Theater in 1915, where she remained until after the end of the First World War. Parallel to her stage work, she took singing lessons with Ludwig Mantler.

In 1917 Molly Wessely starred in the stage Operetta 'Die Rose von Stambul' (1916, The Rose of Stamboul) in Berlin, together with Eugen Rex. This popular operetta in three acts by Austrian composer Leo Fall and a libretto by Julius Brammer and Alfred Grünwald premiered on 2 December 1916 at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna. It was conducted by the composer and starred Hubert Marischka, Betty Fischer, Louise Kartousch and Ernst Tautenhayn. In 1919 a German film version followed, Die Rose von Stambul/The Rose of Stamboul (Felix Basch, Arthur Wellin, 1919).

In 1914 Wessely appeared for the first time in front of the camera in the crime film Lulu, die Löwentänzerin/Lulu, the Lion Dancer (Eugen Illés, 1914) with Richard Liebesny and Vicky Werckmeister. A woman murders her husband, but it is revealed at a circus and she flees the crime. Wearing a black mask she reappears as a noblewoman, but her identity is uncovered and she kills herself. Four years after her film debut and after her stage success in 'Die Rose von Stambul', Wessely starred in Wer in der Jugend nicht küßt/Who Does Not Kiss in Youth (Karl Otto Krause, 1918), produced by Jacob Beck, Deutsche Lichtspielopern-Gesellschaft (Delog). Delog tried to establish its own genre of ‘Film Operetta’ by developing its own material and compositions.

Beck's second attempt was Die Sylvesterwette/The New Year's Eve Bet (Martin Zickel, 1919). The promise that this Film Operetta would be ‘the biggest hit of the season’, which the company made in February 1919 in an advertisement in the trade journal Der Kinematograph, no. 631, was not to be fulfilled. The film was withdrawn from the programme after just one week. The creators of the production were just as dissatisfied with the result as the critics. Composer Jean Gilbert and his librettists Wolff and Zickel distanced themselves from the film even before the premiere. The critics found the direction, acting and setting inadequate, and the music and the hits even more so. The film critic Egon Jacobsohn wrote: ‘In any case, this operetta is a failure.’


German postcard by Photochemie, no. K.2003. Photo: Riess. Molly Wessely in 'Die Rose von Stambul'.


German postcard by Photochemie, no. K. 2004. Photo: Riess. Molly Wessely in 'Die Rose von Stambul' (1917).

The confession of a dead woman

Between 1918 and 1920, Molly Wessely played leading roles in six film productions. On New Year's Eve 1919, she married the director and theatre manager Martin Zickel, with whom she made Die Sylvesterwette/The New Year's Eve Bet (Martin Zickel, 1919).

Molly Wessely acted in films directed by Edmund Edel, such as Frau Hempels Tochter (1919), co-directed with Julius Dewald, and Hannemann, ach Hannemann (1919). Her regular co-actors were Georg Berg, Julius Dewald and Josefine Dora. Wessely's last film was Die Beichte einer Toten/The Confession of a Dead Woman (Martin Zickel, 1920), with Werner Krauss, Paul Morgan and Paul Graetz.

Filmportal also mentions the film Im Löwenkäfig/In the Lion's Cage (Director unknown, 1922), which like her first film was an Urbach production, so the two may have conflated, as Filmportal does not mention the 1914 film, while both Wikipedia and the German Early Cinema Database do.

In the 1920s, Molly Wessely hardly took part in any more fixed engagements, but she sang in several radio productions. From 1930 to 1932, she was a member of the ensemble of the Komische Oper Berlin under the direction of her husband, Martin Zickel.

After Martin Zickel's death in 1932, Molly Wessely seems to have increasingly withdrawn into private life. She died in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1963.


German postcard by Verlag Hermann Leiser, Berlin-Wilm., no. 3206. Photo: B.I.G. Eugen Rex and Molly Wessely in 'Die Rose von Stambul' (1917).


German postcard by Photochemie, no. K. 289. Photo: Alex Binder, Berlin.

Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), German Early Cinema Database, Filmportal, Wikipedia (German) and IMDb.