Aud Egede-Nissen

Biography

Bergen, 30 May 1893: a seagull-screeching morning welcomed Aud Egede-Nissen into the world, and before long the fjords could not contain her. She sprinted from Norway’s coast to Germany’s flickering silent screens, trading salt air for klieg lights and becoming the whirlwind producer-actress who anchored Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), haunted the catacombs of Das Phantom der Oper (1916), and slipped into Tudor silk for Anna Boleyn (1920). Off-set she collected husbands the way other people collected stamps—first the athletic charmer Paul Richter, then the suave Georg Alexander—while steering her own production company through an industry still learning how to speak without words. Half a century after her debut she returned north, settling in Oslo until 6 November 1974, when the final curtain fell on a life spent proving that a Norwegian girl could boss an empire of dreams.