(b. Rózsahegy, Hungary 1904 – d. Hollywood 1964)

Photo from Lorre’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Born as Ladislav Loewenstein. Actor. Interested in the theater from early on, Lorre acted on various stages in Breslau, Zurich and Vienna before coming to Berlin in 1929 when Bertolt Brecht invited him to play the role of Fabian in his production of Marieluise Fleißer’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt. Performances in Dantons Tod and Frühlings Erwachen followed. 1931 proved to be the year of Lorre’s breakthrough. Playing Gala Gay in Brecht’s own production of Mann ist Mann at night, Lorre would stand in front of the cameras of Fritz Lang during the day in the role of the child murderer Hans Beckert in the director’s first sound feature, M. The success of the film turned Lorre into an international film star; after M he appeared in eight more German films, often in smaller comical roles.

In 1933, Lorre emigrated via the much-traveled route first to Vienna, then Paris, then London, before reaching the US through a contract with Columbia Pictures. Known in the United States primarily for his performances as the child murderer in M and as the anarchist in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), Lorre was typecast from the beginning of his U.S. career as a menacing and enigmatic presence, often as a sexual threat or outsider. His most successful period was at Warner Bros. where he appeared next to Humphey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet in numerous films of the 1940s, most notably Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942). In the 1950s his career declined, and he returned to Germany to make his only film as director, Der Verlorene (1951). Disillusioned by the lack of success he returned to Hollywood where he would appear in endless self-parodies on film and television.

(b. Berlin 1901 – d. Paris 1992)

Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel

Born Maria Magdalene Dietrich. Actress and chanteuse. The only world star the German cinema ever produced, Marlene Dietrich’s career spans from Weimar Germany to the Hollywood studios where she worked between 1930 and 1961 with the most acclaimed Hollywood directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair, Stanley Kramer, and most notably Josef von Sternberg with whom she made seven films between 1929 and 1935. Her subsequent career as a singer extended her fame through performances around the world. Combining Prussian discipline and work ethic with an extraordinary talent for reinvention, Dietrich had a professional career of some 70 years, one that included not only classic Hollywood cinema and the concert hall, but also silent film, classical theater, modern theater, musical comedies, vaudeville, the army camp shows, radio, recordings, television, even circus and the ballet. Rising to stardom through her performance of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel (dir. von Sternberg, 1930) she left for Hollywood and later resisted Joseph Goebbels’ many offers to join the film industry of the Third Reich.

Photo from Dietrich’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

In the United States she rose to international stardom but she also experienced the callousness of the Hollywood studio system; when her films ceased to attract audiences she was labeled “box office poison” in 1937. A US citizen as of 1939, she actively supported the war effort by performing for US troops stationed abroad and was awarded the “Medal of Freedom” in 1947, the first woman to receive this distinction. Dietrich’s first return to Germany after the war was in the company of US combat troops. Many Germans never forgave her for what they perceived as a betrayal, picketing her 1960 tour through Germany by demanding that “Marlene go home.” Her last public concert appearance was in Sydney in 1975. A recluse in her apartment for the last years of her life, Dietrich died in Paris in 1992, having willed her remains to be buried in her native Berlin.

(b. Trieste, Austria 1908 – d. Santa Monica, California 1992)

Photo from Henreid’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

Born as Paul von Hernried. Actor. Paul Henreid’s acting career began in Max Reinhardt’s theater in Vienna. Refusing to join the Nazi’s actor guild in Berlin cut short his German career, but he became a celebrated stage actor in London. When resentments and regulations against Germans mounted in England, he accepted an offer from New York, yet the play for which he was hired was never produced; he thus moved to Hollywood. After roles in Night Train (1939) and Joan of Paris (1941), Now, Voyager (1942) established Henreid’s image of the “continental lover,” with his signature gesture of lighting two cigarettes to comfort a distraught Bette Davis. He is best remembered today as Victor Lazlo in Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942), a role which he felt made him famous for the wrong reasons. He considered equally misleading the title of his autobiography, Ladies Man, which he had originally called “Naked in Four Countries.” In 1948, Henreid was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios for joining the Committee for the First Amendment, so he turned to television. In this second career, he proved even more successful, directing more than eighty Hitchcock TV shows as well as many others. As a result of his multifaceted career, Henreid was one of very few Hollywood professionals to have been awarded not one but two stars on the Walk of Fame.

Photo from Sakall’s application for U.S. citizenship. Click to see the application.

By Karen Thomas
Writer, Producer and Director of CINEMA’S EXILES: FROM HITLER TO HOLLYWOOD

Hungarian S.Z. Sakall played an endearing “fussbudget” in over thirty movies between 1940 and 1950. He had found success as a comedian in early German talkies, then when Hitler came on the scene, he returned to Hungary. Producer Joseph Pasternak, a distant cousin, brought Sakall to the United States in 1939. He kept his citizenship papers on the mantel in his living room.