Henry Krauss

Biography

A spring day in Paris—26 April 1866—brought Henry Krauss into the world, and the city’s lights never quite let him go. Over the decades he stepped before the camera and behind it, shaping early French cinema with the same streets that raised him. Audiences first felt his gravity in the 1912 condensation of Hugo’s epic, then followed his haunted Jean Valjean through the 1913 installment that left them clamoring for more. Three years later he donned a different guise entirely, steering the eerie carnival of *Les trois masques* (1921) onto the screen. When the final curtain fell on 15 December 1935, it was still Paris that claimed him, bookending a life spent entirely within her embrace.