Hans Walter Konrad Veidt is a German film and theater actor best known for his roles in the films Anders als die Andern, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Casablanca. Possessing a unique facial expression, he starred in the film "The Man Who Laughts" and received the nickname of the same name "The Man Who Laughs."
Biography
Konrad Veidt was born on January 22, 1893 in the bourgeois district of Berlin, Germany, to Amalia Marie and Philip Heinrich Veidt. His family was Lutheran. Konrad studied at the Hohenzollern Gymnasium in Berlin, but did not finish it, refusing to take the final exams. Then he entered the theater school of the Austrian director, Max Reinhardt. From May 1913 he participated in small productions, but this did not last long.
In 1914, Feidt met the German actress, singer Lucy Mannheim, with whom they began a relationship, and on January 28 he was drafted into the army during the First World War. In 1915 he was sent to the Eastern Front as a non-commissioned officer and took part in the Battle of Warsaw. This was followed by a difficult period of life associated with the transfer of diseases such as jaundice and pneumonia. Konrad was evacuated to a hospital on the Baltic Sea and then sent to serve as a groom at Tilsit.
During his recovery, Konrad received a letter from his beloved that she had found a job in Libau. He applied to the Libau Theater, but failed to get there. Since his condition did not improve, the army allowed him to join the theater so he could entertain the troops. In front-line productions, he played his first major classical roles. He stayed in such a local theater until about 1916, and then joined the troupe of the theater in Liepaja. During the performances, Conrad had to part ways with Lucy Mageme. At the end of 1916, he was re-examined by the army and declared unfit for service, and in January 1917 he was completely dismissed. Veidt returned to Berlin to pursue his acting career.
Feidt again joined Max Reinhardt's troupe, where his partners were Emil Jannings, Werner Kraus and Paul Wegener, and from 1919 to 1923 he took part in productions of various Berlin theaters.
Personal life
During his relatively short life, Konrad Veidt managed to get married three times. The first companion was a cabaret artist, Augusta Hall, known as "Gussy". The wedding took place on June 18, 1918, but the couple divorced four years later. Augusta later married the German actor Emil Jannings.
Feidt's second wife, Felicitas Radke, was from an aristocratic family, they got married in 1923. This marriage was marked by the appearance of a daughter, Vera Viola Maria, who was born on August 10, 1925.
He last married a Hungarian Jew, Ilona Prager, in 1933. They were together until his death.
Career
From 1916 until his death, Konrad Veidt starred in over 100 films. Unlike most of his compatriots and colleagues, Veidt managed to make two different professional careers in Hollywood: the first was in the 1920s - the era of silence, the second in the 1930s and 1940s, after the Nazi takeover of Haremania and Europe. He was an international star during silent films, when the lack of speech was not an obstacle for the actors. He lived in Hollywood for several years after being recruited by John Barrymore. His second Hollywood career began after he was forced to leave the country, first in England and then in California.
At the end of 1916, Feidt made his film debut. His career began with a collaboration with director Richard Oswald, who assigned him various roles in his productions. In 1919, the film "Anders als die Andern" caused an ambiguous reaction, where the aspiring actor played the homosexual violinist, Paul Kerner, who, as a result of blackmail, commits suicide.
Initially, Feidt played the roles of tyrants and mad murderers from Ivan the Terrible to Mr. Hyde in German silent films, but later he managed to play Frederic Chopin, Lord Nelson and Don Carlos. Another of the early works was the play "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" directed by Robert Wien, in which Feidt again got the not very pleasant role of the somnambulist killer Cesare. This production belongs to the classics of German cinematic expressionism.
This is followed by the main role of the disfigured circus artist in the film "The Man Who Laughs". The face with its permanent smile cut out was the visual inspiration for Batman's villainous "Joker", created in 1940 by Bill Finger. Feidt has also starred in other silent horror films such as "The Hands of Orlac", "The Student of Prague" and "Waxworks".
In 1939, Konrad Veidt received British citizenship. In 1940 he moved to Hollywood and continued to act in films, playing mainly the roles of the Nazis. The most famous of them is the role of Major Strasser in "Casablanca". This 1942 Hollywood romantic drama directed by Michael Curtis, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The plot focuses on the inner conflict of a man who has to choose between duty and feeling, between the woman he loves and the need to help her and her husband, the leader of the resistance movement, flee Casablanca to continue the fight against the Nazis.
Konrad Veidt died on April 3, 1943 of a heart attack while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles with singer Arthur Fields and his personal physician, Dr. Bergman, who announced his death. Veidt was 50 years old. In 1998, his ashes were placed in a columbarium niche at the Golders Green crematorium in north London.
Emigration
Feidt was passionate about the Nazi regime and donated much of his personal fortune to Britain to aid in the war. Shortly after the Nazi party took power in Germany and Joseph Goebbels began to purge the film industry of Nazi sympathizers and Jews, Konrad, then married to Elona Prager, emigrated to Britain to avoid any harassing action. Goebbels introduced a "racial questionnaire" in which all workers in the German film industry had to declare their "race" in order to continue working. When Veidt filled out the questionnaire, he replied that he was a Jew, although he was not. His wife was Jewish, and Veidt did not abandon his beloved woman. In addition, the actor, who was not a supporter of anti-Semitism, wanted to show solidarity with the German Jewish community, which was disenfranchised in the spring of 1933.
