Lya de Putti

Hungarian born film star Lya de Putti (1897-1931) portrayed vamps in German and American silent films. In 1925 she reached the zenith of her career with the leading role in the Weimar classic Variété, as the alluring femme fatale between Emil Jannings and Warwick Ward.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1268/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Ufa. Lya de Putti in Varieté (Ewald André Dupont, 1925).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1273/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Hans Natge.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 2023/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Fanam.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3178/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Roman Freulich.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3370/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Roman Freulich.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 727/2, 1925-1926. Photo: Alex Binder. Collection: Didier Hanson.

To the capital of the European silent cinema of the 1920s

Amalia 'Lia' de Putty was born in Vécse, Austria-Hungary (now Vojcice, Slovakia) in 1897 (some sources say 1899). She was a daughter of a Hungarian baron and cavalry officer and a former countess. Lia had two brothers, Geza and Alexander, and a sister, Mitzi.

In 1913 (or 1912 according to some sources) she married county magistrate Zoltán Szepessy and she had two daughters with him.

In Budapest, she began her stage career with a short stint in the vaudeville circuit. In 1918 she made her screen debut with A császár katonái/The Emperor's soldiers (Béla Balogh, 1918).

That year she also divorced Szepessy. Shortly after her divorce she married Ludwig Christensen, who died in 1922.

She made her next film in Romania, Pe valurile fericirii/The waves of happiness (Dolly A. Szigethy, 1920). Then she moved on to the capital of the European silent cinema of the 1920s, Berlin.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinematographie Française. Photo: Grandes Productions Cinématographiques (G.P.C.). Photo: Ica von Lenkeffy as Desdemona and Lya de Putti as Emilia in Othello (Dimitri Buchowetzki, 1922).


French postcard by Edition de la Cinematographie Française. Photo: Grandes Productions Cinématographiques (G.P.C.). Photo: Werner Krauss as Jago and Lya de Putti as Emilia in Othello (Dimitri Buchowetzki, 1922).


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Helga, Count Rudenburg's second wife (Stella Arbenina), and Gerda, the Count's daughter (Lya de Putti), in a fierce get together.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Gerda (Lya de Putti) and her maid (Leonie Taliansky).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 578/1. Luciano Albertini and Lya de Putti in Die Schlucht des Todes (Luciano Albertini, Francis A. Bartoni, 1923). The card depicts the final scene: Luciano has just saved Lya from falling down the Devil's Canyon and reconciles with her after his refusal to acknowledge her illegal child and his failed attempt to suicide.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 578/2, 1919-1924. Photo: Leo Klaude, Berlin / Phoebus Film. Luciano Albertini and Lya de Putti in Die Schlucht des Todes/The Ravine of Death (Luciano Albertini, Albert-Francis Bertoni, Max Obal, 1923).

An alluring femme fatale

In 1920, Lya de Putti progressed to perform classical ballet in Berlin. She became the premiere danseuse at the Berlin Winter Garden in 1924.

In Germany she played supporting roles in films by famous directors. She worked twice with F.W. Murnau, first at the drama Die brennende Acker/Burning Soil (1921) with Vladimir Gajdarov, and then at Phantom (1922) starring Alfred Abel.

She starred in six films produced by Joe May, including the exotic adventure epic Das Indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb (Joe May, 1921) starring Olaf Fønss.

Her biggest hit – especially in the US – was the UFA production Varieté/Jealousy (Ewald André Dupont, 1925). De Putti played the alluring femme fatale Bertha-Marie, who seduces the simple carnival concessionaire Stephan Huller (Emil Jannings) and then betrays him with the handsome acrobat (Warwick Ward). Feeling doubly impotent because he himself had been a famous aerialist before suffering a crippling accident, Jannings fantasises about killing his rival - and, finally, does so.

De Putti followed this success with star performances in Manon Lescaut (Arthur Robison, 1925) opposite Vladimir Gajdarov, and Junges Blut/Young Blood (Manfred Noa, 1926) with Walter Slezak.


French postcard by A.N., Paris, no. 134. Photo: Phoebus Film. Publicity still for Im Namen des Kaisers/In the Name of the Emperor (Robert Dinesen, 1925).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 868/1, 1925-1926. Photo: Binder. Collection Didier Hanson. Early card of De Putti in which her name is still spelled Lia instead of Lya.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1267/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder / Ufa. Lya de Putti in Manon Lescaut (Arthur Robison, 1926).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1267/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder / Ufa. Lya de Putti in Manon Lescaut (Arthur Robison, 1926).


Italian postcard by G.B. Falci, Milano, no. 129. Photo: A. Stefano Pittaluga. Lya de Putti and Vladimir Gajdarov in Manon Lescaut (Arthur Robison, 1926).


Italian postcard by S.A. Stefano Pittaluga, no. 131. Photo: Lya de Putti in Manon Lescaut (Arthur Robison, 1926).

Invitation to Hollywood

Studio mogul Adolph Zukor invited Lya de Putti to come to Hollywood.

At her arrival in New York in February 1926, she told American reporters that she was twenty-two years old. Her ocean liner's records list her as having been twenty-six.

Her American debut was David Wark Griffith's Sorrows of Satan (D.W. Griffith, 1926) starring Adolphe Menjou. The film was released in two versions, one in America and the other in Europe. In the American version one scene had De Putti fully dressed. The same scene in the European release had De Putti topless.

She went to work for Universal in such films as The Heart Thief (Nils Olaf Chrisander, 1927) starring Joseph Schildkraut, Buck Privates (Melville W. Brown, 1928) with Zasu Pitts, and The Scarlet Lady (Alan Crosland, 1928).

In between these films she returned to Germany for a short time in order to shoot Charlotte etwas verrückt/Charlott something crazy (Adolf E. Licho, 1928). During this stay a serious accident happened. Lya de Putti fell down from a window. The press interpreted it as an attempted suicide. But de Putti recovered quickly and returned to the US.

Hollywood generally casted her as a vamp, and she often wore her dark hair short in a style similar to that of Louise Brooks.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1028/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1028/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1028/3, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1268/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder / Ufa.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1269/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder / Ufa.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1269/4, 1927-1928. Photo: Alex Binder / Ufa.

An attempt to make a re-start on Broadway

Lya de Putti was rumored to be engaged to Count Ludwig Salm von Hoogstraten, a former husband of the American oil heiress Millicent Rogers, but she denied the engagement.

De Putti failed to make it big in Hollywood and her Hollywood efforts were inhibited by her foreign accent when the sound film arrived.

She left the screen by 1929 to attempt to make a re-start on Broadway. Later that year she returned to Europe.

In Germany, she could be seen in Rund um die Liebe/About Love (Oskar Kalbus, 1929), a documentary compilation film showing footage from various films with a.o. Lilian Harvey and Valerie Boothby.

She went to England to study the language and also made there the silent film The Informer (Arthur Robison, 1929) with Lars Hanson and Warwick Ward. It would turn out to be her final film.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1273/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Hans Natge.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1349/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Terra Film. Lya de Putti in Junges Blut/Young Blood (Manfred Noa, 1926).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1350/1, 1927-1928. Photo: Terra Film. Walter Slezak and Lya de Putti in Junges Blut/Young Blood (Manfred Noa, 1926).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1562/3, 1927-1928. The signature of the photographer could be "Freimuth", but also "Lutteroth", a photographer in Munich whose work was used by Ross, or "Kurzrock", a photographer from Wiesbaden whose work Ross also used.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 1819/4, 1927-1928. Photo: Fanam.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 1931/2, 1927-1928. Photo: Melbourne Spurr, Hollywood.

A fatal chicken bone

Lya de Putti returned to America. At the end of 1931 followed a macabre and bizarre accident. De Putti swallowed a chicken bone which had to be surgically removed.

At the hospital, she reportedly behaved irrationally and eluded her nurses. Eventually she was found in a corridor. She contracted an infection, then pleurisy in her right side, followed by pneumonia in both lungs.

Lya de Putti died in 1931 in the New York hospital. She was only 34.

According to Wikipedia, she left "just £800 (UK equivalent at the time) and a few bits of jewellery. Four years earlier, £800 was her weekly wage."

She was survived by her third husband, Louis Jahnke, whom she had married in 1922. Her first husband, Zoltán Szepessy, committed suicide shortly after her death.

They had two daughters, Ilona (1914) and Judith (1916). Both daughters were interviewed as old ladies for the documentary Das dritte Leben der Lya de Putti/The Third Life of Lya de Putti (Gisela Scheelein, 1996).

In the film Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) tells her friend Brian Roberts (Michael York)  that Lya de Putti is her 'favourite screen siren'. In a subsequent scene, Bowles dismisses de Putti, claiming that she "makes too many faces."


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 3020/3, 1928-1929.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3221/1, 1928-1929. Photo: Phoebus-Film AG. Livio Pavanelli and Lya de Putti in the German silent film Charlott etwas verrückt/Charlott a little crazy (Adolf E. Licho, 1929).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, Foreign, no. 3452, 1928-1929. Photo: G.L. Manuel Frères, Paris.


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3494/2, 1928-1929. Photo: probably a still from The Heart Thief (Nils Olaf Chrisander, 1927).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, no. 3495/1, 1928-1929. Photo: LPG. Lya de Putti and Joseph Schildkraut in The Heart Thief (Nils Olaf Chrisander, 1927).


German postcard by Ross Verlag, Berlin, no. 3817/3, 1928-1929.

Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Jessica Keaton (Silence is Golden), Thomas Staedeli (Cyranos), Jarod Hitching (IMDb), Wikipedia, Filmportal.de and IMDb.

Der brennende Acker (1922)

This week's film special is about the German silent film Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Murnau shot this drama right before his vampire classic Nosferatu (1922). Der brennende Acker is remarkable for its beautiful exterior shots and its all-star cast, including Vladimir Gajdarov and Lya de Putti. For many decades the film was considered lost, but in 1978 an almost complete print was found in the estate of an Italian priest. This beautiful series of postcards by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, was published for the French release of the film, in France titled La terre qui flambe.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Maria (Grete Diercks) works in the household of Peter Rog and his father. Peter is in love with her and wants to marry her, but she instead loves his younger brother Johannes.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922) with Eugen Klöpfer as Peter Rog.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Peter Rog (Eugen Klöpfer) takes care of his dying father (Werner Krauss).

The Devil's Field

Der brennende Acker presents two households: that of the wealthy Count Josef Emmanuel of Rudenberg and the Rogs, a fairly prosperous farm family who live nearby.

When the old farmer Rog (Werner Krauss) dies, his hard-working son Peter (Eugen Klöpfer) attends him and stays at the farm after his father's death.

The other, younger son is the more worldly Johannes (Vladimir Gajdarov). He has great ambitions and he refuses the love of the servant Maria (Grete Diercks).

His ambition leads the handsome Johannes to charm Gerda (Lya de Putti), the daughter of the old Count Rudenberg (Eduard von Winterstein), who is also dying. Gerda helps Johannes to a job as the secretary of the Count.

Johannes discovers that the Count's second wife Helga (Stella Arbenina) will inherit the Devil's Field. Only he knows that the land sits on an untapped oil field worth a fortune.

Joahnnes turns his attention from Gerda to Helga. When she is widowed, he marries her. His greed leads to death and burning soil.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). At the farm of the Rog family. The housemaid Maria (Grete Diercks) eyes Johannes Rog (Vladimir Gajdarov), but he is only interested in money.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922) with Grete Diercks as the housemaid Marie.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

In the 1920s Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931) was with Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst one of the three great German film directors. Sandra Brennan at AllMovie writes that "To this day German filmmaker F.W.Murnau remains one of the most influential directors of cinema."

He made his directorial debut in 1919, the fantasy film Der Knabe in Blau/Emerald of Death (1919). His next films were also fantasy films: The three-part Satanas/Satan (1919), Murnau's first film with cinematographer Karl Freund and leading actor Conrad Veidt, and Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin/The Hunchback and the Dancer (1920), that marked the start of Murnau's collaboration with screenplay writer Carl Mayer.

With Schloss Vogelöd/The Haunted Castle (1921), filmed in only 16 days, Murnau already proved his ability to create an atmosphere of fear and horror, an ability that he masterly refined in Der Brennende Acker (1922) and his famous vampire film Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens/Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922).

His next film, Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924), utilized unique camera techniques that later became the basis for mise-en-scene. For this film, Karl Freund masterly operated the 'moving camera'. Besides Der letzte Mann, Murnau's literary adaptations Tartüff/Tartuffe (1925) and Faust (1925/26) also rank among the classic films of Weimar cinema produced by Erich Pommer.

In 1926, Murnau moved to Hollywood to work for Fox studios. His first American film, Sunrise: A Story of Two Humans (1927), is considered to be the apex of German silent cinema and won an Academy Award for its artistic quality. His second American film Four Devils (1928) was turned into a happy ending and was equipped with a soundtrack. The same happened to Our Daily Bread/City Girl (1929-1930).

Murnau returned to Berlin but his negotiations with Ufa did not lead to a result. In 1929, he travelled to Tahiti where he made the naïve love story Tabu (1931) at his own expense. Deep in debt, he returned to Hollywood, where Paramount offered him a ten-year contract. Tabu became a box-office hit, but the week before it opened, F.W. Murnau was killed in an auto accident. He was only 42.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Gerda (Lya de Putti) and her maid (Leonie Taliansky).


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Count Rudenburg (Eduard von Winterstein), flanked by, left, his daughter Gerda (Lya de Putti), and right, his second wife Helga (Stella Arbenina).

Der brennende Acker

Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil or in French La terre qui flambe was considered lost for a long time. Until 1978 only the last three reels (totalling 843 meters compared to the original 2,645) of the film were known: this was the black-and-white copy preserved by the East German Cinematheque. In 1979, an almost complete copy of the film was identified only by film historian Vittorio Martinelli at the Cineteca Italiana in Milan. It was a version distributed in Italy under the title 'Il campo del diavolo' (The Devil's Field) whose opening credits and captions in Italian had certainly been made in Italy and whose images were developed in Germany. The copy belonged to a small collection of an Italian religious man who worked in institutions for the mentally ill and entertained the sick by showing old films.

Enno Patalas, director of the Münchener Filmmuseum, obtained an early black-and-white copy from a negative made in Milan: the Italian captions were replaced in Munich with new German titles from the script in the possession of F.W. Murnau's niece. From the early 1980s, this "lost" film was thus once again visible in Germany. However, a colour original still existed in Milan: with the collaboration of the Cineteca Italiana, the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz received the original material on which it was able to begin restoration work.

Having found the original censorship visa of 25 February 1922 with the text of all the captions, it was possible for the Münchener Filmmuseum to reconstruct the captions and inserts (the newspaper pages, letters, will, etc.) with the collaboration of the Pfenninger laboratory. In the absence of a model for the exact layout of the captions, inspiration was taken from other German films of the early 1920s, using dark green as the colour of the captions and light yellow as the colour of the inserts. The restored, colour version of Der brennende Acker was internationally first presented at the festival 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' in Bologna in November 1993.

Helmut Regel in the catalogue of 'Il Cinema Ritrovato', November 1993: "If the Milan copy had a length, including the Italian captions, of 2,346 meters, the new colour negative after the insertion of the new captions measures 2,325 meters. A missing sequence from a copy in the Moscow Gosfilmofond was, in addition, inserted. It is thus 320 meters short of the original footage of the copy intended by the censors (2,645 meters). In September 1993 the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv finished the restoration at the ABC & Taunus laboratory in Wiesbaden, resulting in a final print that comes enormously close to the original colours of the nitrate print. Finally, the long odyssey of a reconstruction had reached its end."

Der brennende Acker was acclaimed for its visual quality and the contrast between the simple rustic farm and the airy and elegant castle. Thorkell A. Ottarsson at IMDb: "The film is quite dramatic and dark, even surprisingly dark at times. A superb film from one of the best directors of all time." To achieve his visual effects, innovative camera angles, and bold lighting, Murnau had two of the most renowned cameramen photograph the film. Fritz Arno Wagner filmed the first part and Karl Freund the second part, and the sets were built by the equally renowned Rochus Gliese. Karl Freund, who began as a projectionist in Berlin and newsreel cameraman, worked for Ufa in the 1920s and gained the international reputation of being a master cameraman. His later credits include such classics as Metropolis, Der lezte Mann/The Last Laugh, Der Golem/The Golem and Variété/Variety.

W. Morrow at IMDb describes beautifully his fascination for Der brennende Acker: "a sustained mood of wintry melancholy, perked by a number of understated but impressive directorial touches. There's business involving a document torn into little pieces that is poetic. When Murnau was at his peak, in such films as Faust and Sunrise, he would stage his effects on a much grander scale, but here he manages to create a beautiful moment with a few torn pieces of paper."


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). The old maid talks to the young servants about the Devil's Field.


French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Helga, Count Rudenburg's second wife (Stella Arbenina), and Gerda, the Count's daughter (Lya de Putti), in a fierce get-together.

French postcard by Edition de la Cinématographie Française, Paris. Photo: G.P.C. Publicity still for Der brennende Acker/Burning Soil/La terre qui flambe (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922). Johannes Rog (Vladimir Gajdarov) arrives too late at the deathbed of his father (Werner Krauss), while, left, his brother Peter (Eugen Klöpfer), and right, the maid Maria (Grete Diercks), look on.

Sources: Helmut Regel (article 'Der brennende Acker', in the catalogue Il Cinema Ritrovato, November 1993; text reused on Italian Wikipedia), Sandra Brennan (AllMovie), John DeBartolo (Silents are Golden), W. Morrow (IMDb), Thorkell A. Ottarsson (IMDb), Yepok (IMDb), Filmportal.de (German), Wikipedia (German) and IMDb.

This post was last updated on 3 July 2022.