CONRAD VEIDT
antebellum artist RENFIELD and i were chatting the other day and he brought up silent screen actor- conrad veidt. i became inspired so here is a little tribute/posting about the life of conrad veidt.
Conrad Veidt (22 January 1893 - 3 April 1943)
He was born Hans Walter Conrad Weidt in a working-class district of Berlin, Germany. (Some biographies wrongly state that he was born in Potsdam, probably on the basis of an early claim on his part.) From 1916 until his death, he appeared in well over 100 movies.
He appeared in two of the most well-known films of the silent era: as a murderous somnambulist in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover and as a disfigured circus performer in The Man Who Laughs (1928). According to the Los Angeles Times, "Conrad Veidt starred in this semi-silent film based on Victor Hugo's novel in which the son of a lord is punished for his father's disrespect to the king by having his face carved into a permanent grin."
Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering gay rights film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others 1919), in which he played what is probably the first gay character written especially for the cinema, and in Das Land ohne Frauen (1929), Germany's first talking picture.
Veidt fervently opposed the Nazi regime, motivating him to emigrate from Germany in 1933 a week after marrying Illona Prager, a Jewish woman. He settled in the United Kingdom and became a British citizen in 1938.
He continued making films in Britain, notably three with director Michael Powell: The Spy in Black (1939), Contraband (1940) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940).
In the 1940s he moved to Hollywood, California, and starred in a few films, such as Nazi Agent (1942), in which he had a dual role as a Nazi and as the Nazi's twin brother, but his best remembered role was as Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (1942).
He died suddenly of a heart attack a year later while playing golf in Los Angeles. In 1998, his ashes were were interred at the Golders Green Crematorium in London.
It's been reported that Veidt identified himself as Jewish on Nazi questionnaires as an act of protest.
