Friedrich Kayßler

Biography

Neurode am Riesengebirge, 7 April 1874: a brewery owner’s son draws his first breath and, without knowing it, will one day embody emperors, detectives and demons on screen. By the time talkies arrived, Friedrich Kayßler’s rumbling voice had already stalked Berlin’s stages; it would soon stalk movie houses as well. In 1934 he mined obsession as the driven engineer in Gold, two years later traded alpenstock for deerstalker as Dr. Mortimer in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and in 1940 slipped into the iron chancellor’s frock coat for Bismarck. Off-camera he twice signed a marriage register—first with actress Helene Fehdmer, later with a woman simply remembered as Luise. Spring 1945 found him in Kleinmachnow, on the outskirts of battered Berlin; there, on 30 April, three weeks after his seventy-first birthday, the curtain fell for good.