Welcome to a new feature of the Louise Brooks Society blog - a monthly entry from Louise Brooks Encyclopedia.
This second entry is devoted to actor Fritz Kortner. The Austrian-born stage and film actor and later theater
director played Dr. Ludwig Schön in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929).
Fritz Kortner with Louise Brooks in Pandora's Box (1929). |
Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Kortner studied at the
city's Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Kortner took part in Vienna's rich
cultural life, and around this time met the critic and satirist Karl Kraus, who
helped shape the hopeful actor's thinking on the theater as well as his Jewish
identity. (Earlier, in 1904, Kraus was instrumental in helping Wedekind stage his Lulu plays
in Vienna.) After graduation, Kortner moved to Berlin to make his name. He joined
Max Reinhardt's theater company in 1911, performing in King Oedipus, Faust, and
Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist, where he
likely met Tilly Wedekind. After five years with Reinhardt, Kortner joined Leopold
Jessner's company. Kortner's breakthrough came in 1919 with his performance in
Ernst Toller's Transfiguration; soon
afterward, Kortner became one of Germany's best-known actors and the nation's
foremost performer of Expressionist works. He went on to appear in many
classical and modernist plays, including works by Arthur Schnitzler and Bertolt Brecht.
Kortner played Schigolch in a 1919 production of Die Büchse der Pandora at the Hamburger Kammerspiele. And in a 1926, in production at the Schauspielhaus Berlin, he was both Dr. Schön and Jack the Ripper. (The role of Lulu in the latter production was played by Gerda Müller, an actress with whom he had performed in Macbeth. Her circle included Brecht and the noted conductor Hermann Scherchen, to whom she was briefly married.)
Fritz Kortner (far right) as Schigolch in a 1919
production of Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora.Mirjam Horwitz (middle) played Lulu. |
Kortner played Schigolch in a 1919 production of Die Büchse der Pandora at the Hamburger Kammerspiele. And in a 1926, in production at the Schauspielhaus Berlin, he was both Dr. Schön and Jack the Ripper. (The role of Lulu in the latter production was played by Gerda Müller, an actress with whom he had performed in Macbeth. Her circle included Brecht and the noted conductor Hermann Scherchen, to whom she was briefly married.)
Fritz Kortner (far right) as Jack the Ripper in a 1926
production of Wedekind's Die Büchse der Pandora. Gerda Müller (left) played Lulu, and Lucie Hoflich played the Countess Geschwitz (middle). |
On stage, Kortner was known for his powerful voice and
explosive energy; in the 1920's, however, his work began to incorporate greater
realism as he developed a more controlled delivery and greater use of gesture.
His considerable fame during the years of the Weimar Republic was linked to his
playing Shakespeare's most problematic characters, Othello, Richard III,
Hamlet, and especially Shylock. His presentation of the latter made him a
target of the right, with Nazi pundits depicting the actor as a lecherous Jew. In
March of 1929, not long after the debut of Pandora's Box, Kortner was falsely accused of raping a gentile
woman.
Kortner appeared in over ninety films. His specialty was complex,
sinister characters. His films include starring roles in Warning Shadows (1923, with Fritz Rasp), The
Hands of Orlac (1924), Beethoven
(1927), The Woman One Longs For
(1929), The Ship of Lost Men (1929,
with Marlene Dietrich), Atlantic
(1929, with Francis Lederer), Dreyfus
(1930, with Fritz Rasp), and Chu Chin
Chow (1934, with Anna May Wong), as well as later supporting roles in The Razor's Edge (1946) and Berlin Express (1948). In Pabst's Pandora's Box, Kortner reprised the role
of Dr. Schön, a respected, middle-aged newspaper publisher entangled in a love
affair with Lulu.
Like Pabst, Kortner was artistically and politically aligned
against the Nazis. With Hitler's rise to power, the Jewish actor left Germany,
emigrating in 1933 to Vienna, then to London, and then New York–where he renewed
his friendship and was an advisor to the influential American journalist and broadcaster
Dorothy Thompson. Eventually, Kortner ended up in Hollywood, where he found
work as a character actor and theater director. His stay in Los Angeles brought
him into contact with new acquaintances like Charlie Chaplin, and old friends and
fellow exiles like Brecht, Salka Viertal, and Heinrich Mann. Following the war,
Kortner along with Brecht and others committed themselves to rebuilding the
German stage. The actor returned to his shattered homeland in 1949. In the
decades that followed, he was noted for his innovative and sometimes
controversial staging of classics by Molière, Schiller, and Shakespeare; in the
latter's Richard III (1964), the King crawls over piles of
corpses at the play's end. Kortner penned his memoirs and died in Munich in
1970, at the age of 78.
Below are some scenes from Warning Shadows featuring Kortner.
Below are some scenes from Warning Shadows featuring Kortner.
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