Aage Hertel

Biography

Born under a grey Scandinavian sky on 17 October 1873, Aage Hertel grew into a performer whose face flickered across early Danish screens long before the word “movie star” existed. Audiences first felt his presence in the 1911 silent Hamlet, where his interpretation of courtly intrigue still whispers from the nitrate. Five years later he slipped into the shadows of crime serials, resurrecting the elusive “Man with Nine Fingers” for both the third and fourth installments in 1916. Hertel’s career spanned the infancy of Nordic cinema, and when the final curtain fell on 3 January 1944, Denmark quietly closed the lens on one of its first on-screen ghosts.