Lola Montes
1955
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Half-Jewish
- He had a love of music and studied the piano and guitar, but decided to carry on the family tradition, and became a successful actor in Austrian cinema and theatre. Homosexual, and classified as half-Jewish, Walbrook left Austria in 1936.
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Apr 27, 2021 · It must be fairly unusual for someone who was referred to as a ‘Jewish actor’ and was admired for his generous support of Jewish refugees during World War II, to have also been boycotted by Jewish groups due to suspicions of being a Nazi spy.
Rather than returning to Germany, where he risked persecution because he was a mixed race in the first degree as his mother was Jewish, [4] and because he was homosexual, [5] he settled in England, where he continued working as an actor, specialising in playing continental Europeans.
A hugely popular film star in both Hitler’s Germany and in wartime Britain, actor Anton Walbrook was famous under two different names. Of Jewish heritage, and gay in an era when homosexuality was illegal he cultivated a mysterious image.
(1955) Walbrook--who had left Germany in the early 1930s--would not speak to either Anneliese Rothenberger (extremely temperamental) or Oskar Sima (playing Frosch, in the film a signally unfunny interpreter), both of whom he claimed had been Nazis.
- November 19, 1896
- August 9, 1967
Jul 31, 2022 · Adolf Wohlbrück (yet to become Anton Walbrook) gave his religion as Catholic to the German authorities in 1933. His father was Lutherian, his schooling was Catholic; so was his mother, but her ancestry was Jewish and although the authorities were suspicious, Wohlbrück managed to conceal both his non-Aryan roots and his homosexuality from them.
Jun 25, 2021 · While modern accounts of Walbrook’s emigration from Germany emphasise the danger he was in due to his mother being Jewish, there was no evidence from contemporary interviews that this was a concern, and indeed genealogical research revealed that his Jewish ancestors had embraced Catholicism at least a generation previously.
Walbrook was characterised as only partly German, due to his Jewish family history, and joined the flood of émigré German film workers in 1935. By that time he was Germany’s premier film star.
