European Actors
Sven Bertil-Taube was born in Stockholm in 1934. He is a reknowned folk singer who has also acted in movies. Among his films are “Puppet on a Chain” with Barbara Parkins in 1971 and “The Eagle Has Landed”. Most recently he has starred in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”.
Born in1936 sometimes credited simply as Sandor Eles, was a Hungarian actor. He was best known latterly for TV and film work.
Born in Tatabánya, 60 km from Budapest, Elès was orphaned during World War II, and emigrated to England during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He began his acting career on stage, and went on to appear in a host of television roles, the majority on ITV. These included the ITC series Danger Man, The Baron, The Saint, Timeslip and Jason King.
He made appearances in The Avengers, The Professionals, Strange Report and Upstairs, Downstairs. Often cast in generic ‘foreigner’ roles (diplomats, waiters, desk clerks), he most often played Frenchmen. Éles became a British citizen on 10 January 1977.
One of his most memorable film roles was as the mysterious Paul in the Brian Clemensthriller And Soon the Darkness. He also had major roles in the Hammer Horror movies Countess Dracula (1971) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) as well as appearing for four years in the 1980s as the scheming restaurant manager, Paul Ross, in the British TV soap opera Crossroads.
In 1996, Elès returned to his cultural roots, appearing as the narrator in the Bartókopera, Bluebeard’s Castle. The concert performances, given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Bernard Haitink, were recorded for CD
Elès died in Kilburn, London on 10 September 2002, aged 66, apparently from a heart attack.
The great boxer Max Schmeling was born in 1905 in Brandenburg, Germany. He was World Heavyweight Champion from 1930 to 1932. He was married to actress Anna Ondra. He was featured in the films “Liebe in Ring” in 1930 and “Knockout” in 1935. After retiring from the ring, he became a very wealthy businessman and died in his 100th year in 2005.
His “Guardian” obituary by Mike Lewis:
Max Schmeling, Germany’s former world heavyweight champion, who has died aged 99, will primarily be remembered as the boxer who lost the most politically charged sporting bout in history. That was his crushing, one-round defeat by the American Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber”, at New York’s Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938.
From the opening bell, Louis, the champion, tore into Schmeling and sent him staggering around the ring under a merciless assault. Schmeling, dropped three times, was bewildered, semi-conscious and slumped on all fours when rescued by the referee, after one of the most savage onslaughts ever seen in a prize ring. The victory of Louis, after two minutes and four seconds, was his most awesome performance.
It was the approach of the second world war that transformed the nature of the fight and made Schmeling an unwilling propaganda tool of the Nazis. The confrontation was sold as a fight between a member of Hitler’s “master race” and an American black, and assumed huge symbolic importance.
There were calls to “boycott Nazi Schmeling” and he protested in vain that this was “just another fight”. While, despite Louis’s assertion that he was fighting for “the good old USA”, white reporters from southern states – where Jim Crow white supremacist racialseg regation ruled – openly hankered for a German victory. Even as Schmeling, nicknamed “Hitler’s show-horse”, had tea with the Führer on his way to the title challenge bout, German troops massed on the borders of Czechoslovakia.
The drama began on June 19, 1936, when Schmeling caused the “sensation of the century” by knocking out Louis in the 12th round of a non-title bout. That defeat for Louis – his first in 28 fights – caused riots in Harlem. A man who had backed Schmeling was stabbed and had his skull fractured.
Schmeling’s success happened two months before the Nazi attempt to use the Berlin Olympics as a showcase for white, Aryan supremacy (ruined by the triumph of black American athlete Jesse Owens).
Schmeling’s future would have been different had he lost that first encounter with Louis. During the build-up, friendly US sportswriters described the German as gentlemanly, sportsmanlike and courageous. Their attitude changed dramatically when Schmeling, a huge underdog, flattened the unbeaten Louis with a straight right.
The fight was almost ignored by the Nazi press, after Hitler privately questioned the wisdom of taking on the invincible American; but Schmeling’s shock victory led to wild celebrations in Germany. He received congratulatory cables from the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels; and also from Marlene Dietrich, by then in American exile.
A film of the fight played to packed houses in Germany. A Nazi weekly journal, Das Schwarz Korps, commented: “Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race.”
The irony was that Schmeling, who had been world heavyweight champion from 1930-32, did not support Hitler’s racial and religious persecutions. In 1935, he had blatantly defied the Führer’s order to replace Joe Jacobs, his Jewish-American trainer. He also refused to divorce his Czechoslovakian film star wife, Anny Ondra. On November 9, 1938, five months after his defeat by Louis, he sheltered two Jewish boys in his Berlin apartment during Kristalnacht, when the Nazis instigated public violence against Germany’s Jews.
Born in Uckermark, in the state of Brandenburg, Schmeling was raised in Hamburg and had ambitions to be a football goalkeeper until, at the age of 14, he saw a newsreel of the US boxer Jack Dempsey. Schmeling, self-taught, developed sound skills, an iron physique and a powerful punch with either hand. He turned professional in August 1924, winning the Germany light-heavyweight title three years later and the European crown in 1928.
In pre-Nazi Berlin, one of the most glamorous, exciting cities in Europe, Schmeling was as feted by high society as was Dietrich at the height of her Blue Angel movie success. “It was a time that wanted heroes,” he remembered.
Following two successful European title defences, Schmeling moved up to heavyweight to challenge American Jack Sharkey for the world title, left vacant by the retirement of Gene Tunney. The fight was in New York on June 12, 1930; Schmeling won on a foul in round four, after a short left hook to the groin left him in agony. It was the first time the world title had been decided in such circumstances.
Schmeling beat Young Stribling on a 15th-round stoppage at Cleveland in 1931, only to lose his title on a split decision to Sharkey at Long Island on June 21, 1932, a controversial verdict that prompted an enraged Jacobs to cry: “We wuz robbed.”
Schmeling paid a high price for his defeat by Louis. He was the only top German sportsman to be drafted into the Wehrmacht. At the outbreak of war, he was called into a parachute regiment, and, in 1941, was wounded in the battle for Crete.
Having lost his property and wealth in the war, Schmeling made a comeback on his 42nd birthday, knocking out Werner Vollmer in round seven. He went on to beat Hans Joachim Dragstein, but was outpointed by Walter Neusel, whom he had stopped in 1934. His last fight was in October 1948; he was outpointed by Richard Vogt. In all, Schmeling had 70 fights, winning 53, including 39 stoppages, drawing four and losing 10. He ploughed his earnings into a farm, acquired business skills and secured a production licence from Coca-Cola.
The longest-lived world heavyweight champion, Schmeling became a successful businessman and a popular, well-respected member of Hamburg society. He avoided interviews, believing that the media had an unhealthy obsession with his distant past. He was probably the last living person to have spoken with Franklin Roosevelt, Hitler, Al Capone, Pope Pius XII – and Marlene Dietrich.
Three decades ago, he said he was almost happy that he had lost the great fight. “Just imagine if I would have come back to Germany with a victory. I had nothing to do with the Nazis, but they would have given me a medal. After the war I might have been considered a war criminal.” He stayed friends with Louis in later years, and even gave him financial help.
He met Anny Ondra on set while he was appearing in a film. They married in 1932, she died in 1987.
· Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling, boxer, born September 28 1905, died February 2 2005
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Amira Casar holds both Irish and French citizenship. She was born in London, grew up in Ireland at at sixteen moved to France with her parents. She worked as a model before studying acting. Her films include “Why Not Me” in 1999, “Transylvania” and “An Old Mistress”.
IMDB entry:
Frank Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1928. He starred in Elia Kazan’s “America, America” in 1963 and “Once Upon A Time in the West” in 1968. He died in 1971 in Rome.
Ruth Leuwerik was born in 1924 in Essen, Germany. She is best known for her playing of Maria Von Trapp in the German made “The Trapp Family” in 1956 and it’s sequel “The Trapp Family in America” in 1958.
IMDB Entry:
Often called the First Lady of German cinema, Ruth Leuwerik was at the peak of her popularity during the 1950’s when partnered on screen by the leading male stars of the post-war era: Dieter Borsche, Hannes Messemer, Curd Jürgens and O.W. Fischer. She proved her range by alternating between glamorous damsels and emancipated, resilient heroines in quality productions, invariably directed by master film makers like Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Robert Siodmak or Helmut Käutner.
Young Ruth first became enamoured with acting after watching a movie with Greta Garbo at the age of ten. Julius Martin Leeuwerik, a merchant, was sufficiently prosperous to afford his daughter private acting tuition after she was initially rejected by Berlin’s premier acting academy. Undeterred, Leuwerik made her theatrical debut in 1943. The war, however, proved decidedly limiting to further career prospects. Between 1947 and 1949, she was able to gain steady theatrical engagements in Bremen and Lübeck. The following year, she came to the attention of film audiences in the vacation comedy, Dreizehn unter einem Hut (1950). Success was almost immediate and work on the stage henceforth took a back seat to the celluloid medium.
Between 1950 and 1963, Ruth Leuwerik starred in 28 pictures, nearly all of them box-office gold. These ranged from creaky melodramas like Die große Versuchung (1952) and Geliebte Feindin (1955) to prestige pictures like Rosen im Herbst (1955) (as Effie Briest, based on the novel by Theodor Fontane) and Ludwig II: Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955) (as Empress Elisabeth of Austria). Her varied roles encompassed not only the standard Mittel-European aristocratic heroines of the period, but also hardy bourgeois mothers, victims of circumstance and dedicated professional women. She played Maria von Trapp in The Trapp Family (1956) — long before the musical version with Julie Andrews was conceived — and showcased her abilities as a serious dramatic actress in the role of a priest’s daughter, on trial for murdering her husband, in the title role of A Matter of Minutes (1959). Another moving and sympathetic portrayal was that of the physician Hanna Dietrich, tending to 300 German POW’s inside a Siberian concentration camp, in the gritty post-war drama Taiga (1958). This particular performance won her the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Arguably the culmination of her career was Sweetheart of the Gods (1960), a biopic of the tragic actress _Renate Müller (I)_. Voted Germany’s most popular actress by Bravo, “the magazine for film and television”, Leuwerik also picked up four prestigious Bambi Awards in 1953, 1960, 1961 and 1962. She was the first German actress to participate in a Royal Performance in London in 1960.
From 1964 — having rejected an offer from Hollywood — Leuwerik began to withdraw from public life and restrict her appearances to occasional guest spots on television. Unlike other screen divas, her personal life was remarkably devoid of scandal and controversy. Her second husband was the famous German opera singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Ruth Leuwerik died in Munich in January 2016 at the age of 91.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: I.S.Mowis
The above IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.
Madeleine Robinson was born in 1916 in Paris. She made her movie debut in 1935 in “Promesses”. Her other films include “The Royalists” in 1947, “Tuesday’s Guest” and “Alone in the World”. She died in 2004 in Lausanne Switzerland.
Ronald Bergan’s “Guardian” obituary:
Despite her Anglo-Saxon-sounding name, the actor Madeleine Robinson, who has died aged 87, typified the sophistication and allure of French stars, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, she was born Madeleine Svoboda in Paris of a Czech father, a pastry chef, and French mother who was a bus conductor. She chose the name of Daniel Defoe’s castaway because “it was a synonym of liberty”. Throughout her life, she had a series of poodles that she called Vendredi (Friday). Determinedly independent, Robinson was known not only for the intensity of her performances but for her fiery temperament off stage and screen. Her confrontations with directors, and squabbles with her lovers and husbands (one of her three being the Spanish writer and actor José-Luis de Villalonga) fed the gossip columns.
She started work in a factory at the age of 14, and then worked as a messenger girl and as a maid in the house of an artist, who encouraged her to enrol for a drama course given by the celebrated director Charles Dullin in the school attached to his Thétre de l’Atelier. In 1934, aged 18, she appeared in Soldiers Without Uniform, the first of her 79 films, and it was not long before she gained substantial roles in films by the leading French directors of the day, both before the war and during the German occupation. One of the best was Jean Grémillon’s Lumiere d’Été (1943), banned by the Vichy authorities for its allegorical attack on the decadence and corruption of the ruling classes. Written by Jacques Prévert, it was set in an isolated mountain hotel where Robinson is the focal point as a naive young woman who has come to meet her dissolute fiance (Pierre Brasseur), a drunken artist. Disappointed in the soullessness of this society and disillusioned by her fiance, she is drawn to a young engineer whose values eventually inspire her to love.
In Douce (1943), directed by Claude Autant-Lara, she is far from innocent as the ambitious tutor to a young daughter of an aristocratic family with designs on marrying the head of the household. The following year, she was a young woman trapped in a dreary village, in Sortilèges (1945) by Christian-Jaque, with another poetic Prévert screenplay. Doom and gloom continued in Yves Allegret’s Une Si Jolie Petite Plage (Riptide, 1945), an archetypal fatalistic postwar French drama, which cast Robinson opposite Gérard Philipe in the role of a fugitive at a desolate seaside resort in rainy Normandy in winter.As a dishevelled chambermaid, she vainly tries to rescue him from despair.Not much joy either in Dieu A Besoin Des Hommes (1950) by Jean Delannoy, where Robinson, living on a rugged and barren island off the Brittany coast, is the fiancee rejected by Pierre Fresnay, when he decides that his calling is to become a priest.
For much of the 1950s, Robinson made films for, in her words, raisons alimentaires, but later benefited from better roles as a mature woman. Claude Chabrol astutely cast her as a neurotic wife of an adulterous wine merchant in A Double Tour (Web Of Passion, 1959), which gained her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. She was also effective as Joseph K’s landlady, Frau Grubach, in Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962). Meanwhile, Robinson was enjoying a parallel stage career, especially powerful in Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; as the domineering mother in Cocteau’s Les Parents Terribles, the foul-mouthed Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and playing Brecht’s Mother Courage. One of her last notable screen roles was as the narrow-minded mother of Isabelle Adjani, who took the title role in Camille Claudel (1988).
In 1993, Robinson retired to her house in Switzerland, garlanded with many awards including the Legion of Honour, the National Order of Merit, and Commander of Arts and Letters.· She is survived by a son; her daughter predeceased her.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed online here.
Marianne Sagebrecht was born in 1945 in Bavaria, Germany. Her films include “Bagdad Cafe”, “Sugarbaby” and “War of the Roses” with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner.
TCM Overview:
This character player with a heart-shaped face and child-like features began her career as a leading producer and performer of Germany’s alternative theater/cabaret scene. The eclectic background of Marianne Sagebrecht included stints as a medical lab assistant and magazine assistant editor before she found her calling in show business. Claiming to be inspired by Bavaria’s mad King Ludwig II, she became known as the “mother of Munich’s sub-culture” as producer and performer of avant-garde theater and cabaret revues, particularly with her troupe Opera Curiosa. Spotted by director Percy Adlon in a 1977 production of “Adele Spitzeder” in which she essayed the role of a delicate prostitute, Sagebrecht was cast as Madame Sanchez/Mrs. Sancho Panza in Adlon’s TV special “Herr Kischott” (1979), a spin on “Don Quixote”. The director put her in his 1983 feature “The Swing” in a small role and then created the leading role of Marianne, an overweight mortician in love with a subway conductor, in “Sugarbaby” (1985) especially for her.
American films beckoned as well and Sagebrecht was often cast in roles tailored to her unique abilities. Paul Mazursky reworked the part of a Teutonic masseuse for her in “Moon Over Parador” (1988) while Danny De Vito tailored the part of the German housekeeper for a divorcing couple in “The War of the Roses” (1989). Returning to Germany, she shone as the timid maid in the 1930s who marries her Jewish employer for convenience then falls in love in “Martha and I” (1990; released in the USA in 1995). Sagebrecht headlined the black comedy as an unhappy wife whose straying husband plots her death in “Mona Must Die” (1994) and had small supporting parts in “The Ogre” (1996) and “Lost Luggage” (1998).
The above TCM overview can now be accessed online here.
Anyone who knows me are aware that I am a bit of a movie buff. Over the past few years I have been collecting signed photographs of my favourite actors. Since I like movies so much there are many actors whose work I like.
