Anecdotes

By his own account, he made at least 30 silent films in Germany and starred in the first talking picture ever made there.

In 1939 he married socialite and photographer Florence Meyer (1911-62), a daughter of "The Washington Post" owner, Eugene Meyer.

Fled Germany in 1933 to Paris after the Nazis took over, then London where his career soon resumed on the stage and in film. Soon thereafter he was invited to the US, where he spent most of the next 14 years as a character actor, generally playing a cruel or bumbling European whose thick accent and thicker eyebrows were his key defining attributes.

His first wife was Grete Mosheim, a German actress of Jewish ancestry on her father's side. They married in Berlin on 6/28/28, but divorced in 1937. She later married Howard Gould. His second wife, Baroness Vally Hatvany (d. 1938), was a Hungarian actress. They married in December 1937, but she died four months later.

In spite of a performance he gave in Munich in 1924 while he was completely drunk--he staggered more over the stage than the spotlights and famous critic Ihering wrote "It was the most impertinent entrance I have ever seen"--he secured an engagement in Berlin.

He returned to England in the mid-'60s to play Soviet KGB Col. Stok in Mes funérailles à Berlin (1966) and Un cerveau d'un milliard de dollars (1967), opposite Michael Caine. His last film was the Blake Edwards romantic drama The Tamarind Seed (1974).

With the takeover in Germany of Naziism, he--although not Jewish--moved to Britain, where he starred in the films Rhodes of Africa (1936) with Walter Huston, and Everything Is Thunder (1936) with Constance Bennett.

He died of pneumonia in Tunbridge Wells Kent, England, on 1/27/78, just three months after the death of his fourth wife, Joan Tetzel.

Made his home in England after 1966.

In 1967 he was awarded the Filmband in Gold of the Deutscher Filmpreis for outstanding contributions to German cinema.

He played Adolf Verloc in two adaptations of the 1907 novel "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad: Sabotage (1936), in which the character was named Karl Anton Verloc, and The Secret Agent (1959).

His career in television included appearances in several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) in 1957 and 1960.

In 1935 he emigrated to England and spelled his first name with a "c" from then on.

In 1951 he returned to Austria to play the village judge Adam in the play 'The Broken Jug' by Kleist during the Salzburg Festival. His partner--as wife Marthe Rull--was Therese Giehse. The work was subsequently performed at the Vienna Burgtheater.

He acted with Ingrid Bergman in Rage in Heaven (1941), with Marilyn Monroe in Sept ans de réflexion (1955), with Ronald Reagan in Prisoner of War (1954) and with Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969).

After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, he learned his trade at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts between 1915-17. After that he made his debut at the Komödienhaus Vienna. Success there led to work in the much more prestigious German theatrical community in Munich, where in 1924 he played Mortimer in the premiere of Bertolt Brecht's play "The Life of Edward II of England" at the Munich Kammerspiele, and since 1925 in Berlin where he worked under Max Reinhardt.

He was in the first German performance of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" in 1924.