Uschi Elleot

Uschi Elleot (1899–1975) was a German stage and film actress who starred in several silent films. She was the younger sister of actress Carola Toelle. After her cinema career ended, she emigrated to the United States and married an American.


German postcard by Verlag Ross, Berlin, no. 351/1, 1919-1924. Photo: Becker & Maass / Deutsche Bioscop. Collection: Geoffrey Donaldson Institute.


German postcard by Verlag Ross, Berlin, no. 351/2, 1919-1924. Photo: Becker & Maass / Deutsche Bioscop.

A silent operetta

Uschi Elleot was born Olga Margarete Lucia Toelle in 1899 in Berlin. Her parents were the engineer Rudolph Carl Toelle and Rosalie Toelle, née Wernicke. Lucia Toelle was the younger sister of Carola Toelle.

She chose the backward version of her family name as her stage name. With the help of her sister, who introduced her to director Nils Chrisander, Uschi Elleot made her film debut in Chrysanthème (Nils Chrisander, 1918).

Chrisander cast Elleot in three of his productions in quick succession, including the silent drama Die weißen Rosen von Ravensberg / The White Roses of Ravensberg (Nils Chrisander, 1919).

Then, other directors hired her and she appeared in the silent operetta Schwarzwaldmädel / The Black Forest Girl (Arthur Wellin, 1920), based on the 1917 operetta of the same title by Leon Jessel.

With her sister Carola Toelle, she played in Der Spielmann / The Minstrel (Karl Otto Krause, 1921). At the same time, Uschi Elleot also appeared in musical theatre productions, for example, in 1921 in Ernst Steffan's operetta 'Das Milliardensouper' at the Berliner Theater, where she had Ralph Arthur Roberts and Hilde Wörner as partners.


German postcard by Verlag Ross, Berlin, no. 351/3, 1919-1924. Photo: Becker & Maass / Deutsche Bioscop.



German postcard by Verlag Ross, no. 1145/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Karl Schenker.

She first set foot on American soil in New York

Uschi Elleot was married to the conductor and composer James Siegfried Nicklass from 1916 to 1927.

Her later films included the silent historical drama Marie Antoinette - Das Leben einer Königin / Marie Antoinette, the Love of a King (Rudolf Meinert, 1922) with Diana Karenne, and the drama Bohème - Künstlerliebe / La Boheme (Gennaro Righelli, 1923).

Elleot retired from the film business in the mid-1920s. One of her last films was the drama Heiratsschwindler / The Marriage Swindler (Carl Boese, 1925) starring Reinhold Schünzel.

Instead, she began appearing as a singer. In the 1928/1929 theatre season, she played alongside Fritzi Massary in the operetta 'The Merry Widow' at the Metropol-Theatre and sang a song from the operetta on a record with her stage partner Walter Jankuhn.

In 1933, she first set foot on American soil in New York, coming from Bremen. Lucia Toelle married Gert von Gontard there and moved with him to California. In December 1939, she became an American citizen. After their divorce (around 1944), she lived in Brazil, where she lived as Lucia Margaret Drew. She returned to New York in the early 1960s, where she died in 1975.


German postcard by Verlag Hermann Leiser, Berlin-Wilm., no. 6825. Photo: Atelier Riess, Berlin.


German postcard by Verlag Hermann Leiser, Berlin-Wilm., no. 6826. Photo: Atelier Riess, Berlin-W.

Sources: Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Filmportal, Wikipedia (German and English) and IMDb.