Alajos Mészáros

Biography

Budapest, 14 July 1877: a restless boy named Alajos Mészáros is born into the city’s swelling Belle-Époque bustle. By his late thirties he has traded cobblestones for klieg lights, stepping before the camera in the quicksilver dawn of Hungarian cinema. In 1915 alone he animates two milestones—Liliomfi’s roguish charm and the duped reporter of A becsapott újságíró—then slips into the crinolines and family intrigues of A Nagymama the following year. Off-screen he shares his life with actress Kató Berky, their marriage a quiet counter-melody to the flickering images racing through projectors. Barely five years after his screen debut, the curtain falls: Mészáros dies in his hometown on 17 October 1920, leaving behind a trio of surviving films and a ghost of what might have been.