The face you loved to hate so well in film, was in fact
another person altogether.
I remember his career backwards, like in some character in
an avant-garde film, since I generally saw his last roles first. As a kid, I remember him first as the
sneering Nazi officer Major Strasser in Casablanca. Conrad Veidt was a strident anti-Nazi took pains to get roles to
show how vile the Nazis were to a pre-war audience. I also remember him as Jaffar, the evil vizier in The Thief of
Bagdad with those powerful hypnotic eyes.
From there my remembrance jumps to Veidt as the somnolent
puppet of the Doctor in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, although the first few
times I saw the movie, I didn’t know him.
Well that is somewhat out of backwards sequence, but who said memory was
linear or for that matter, of time but made up of associations. Heaven knows free association has led me
down some interesting path. Much of my
blog posts are an amalgamation of memory, associations, and serendipity.
From here I had to find some biographical data on Conrad Veidt, because I only knew his as a series of characters, not as a person. I was pleased to find that he personally was the antithesis of nearly every role he ever played. Not only was he actually good guy, but a man who tried to reverse the flow of history in his own way.
He was blacklisted in prewar Nazi Germany due to his
politics and for being married to a Jew, his third wife Llona. They fled Germany in 1933 to escape
persecution and became a British citizen in 1939. He loaned his considerable fortune to the British Government and
donated large amounts of his film salaries to help with the British war effort during WWII
As an interesting near-miss, he was in the running for
playing the dreaded Count in Dracula, but lost the role to Bella Lugosi in
1931. Of interest to most of my blog
readers is that Veidt played in horror films
and psychological thrillers over the years before he became a much more subtle
monster in Casablanca.
Not bad for a guy who just fell into acting. He died of a heart attack in 1943, not
living long enough to see the end of Hitler’s regime, but did his own part in
resistance. Check out the links below
for information about his films. Conrad
Veidt is not well known in the United States as an actor in early horror and
science fiction film and I hope that I can change that perceptive of an actor
that is largely forgotten.
CoastConFan
Here is a partial list of Conrad Veidt’s works
Around the World in Eighty
Days (1919) A silent film I
have never seen.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Das Cabinet
des Dr. Caligari (1920) as Chesare
The Head of Janus (Der Januskopf)
(1920) A film based on Dr Jeckl and Mr Hyde
The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs
Hände) (1924) Transplanted hands
kill
Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett)
(1924)
The Man Who Laughs (1928) He was a sort of proto-Joker character
King of the Damned (1935) Movie about
Devil’s Island
The Thief of Bagdad (1940) he played Jaffar
Casablanca (1942) You remember him as Maj Strasser
Some of Conrad Veight’s masterworks are available on
YouTube:
Cabinet of Dr Caligari http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrg73BUxJLI
The Thief of Bagdad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WXrYUOCApk
The Man Who Laughs (part 1/11) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsLQcOV2YeU
Waxworks (part 1/9) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNTuHjq64RA
Hands of Orlac http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGff-jovycQ
Links of interest about Conrad Veidt
