Friedrich Kühne

Biography

April 24, 1870, a boy drew his first breath in Moravia, then the polyglot heart of Austria-Hungary; decades later the region would be mapped as the Czech Republic, but by then Friedrich Kühne had already wandered far beyond its borders. On German screens he became the face you couldn’t forget: the tormented Moor in Othello (1922), the deerstalker-shadowed detective hunting The Hound of the Baskervilles (1915), and the scheming courtier whispering around Anne Boleyn in Anna Boleyn (1920). When the final curtain fell, it fell in Berlin on October 13, 1958, closing a life lived in flickers of silver nitrate and gaslight.