Leopoldine Konstantin

Biography

On a brisk spring day in 1886, Brünn—then the humming heart of Austria-Hungary—welcomed Leopoldine Konstantin, a girl whose quicksilver talent would soon outgrow the city’s medieval walls. Before she turned twenty, she had already bewitched silent-film audiences as the mischievous spirit of *Die Insel der Seligen* (1913). A few years later she slipped into the silken shoes of the titular temptress in *Lola Montez* (1918), proving that her allure could survive the jump from flickering title cards to roaring talkies. Hollywood eventually beckoned, and in 1946 she traded the ruins of post-war Europe for Hitchcock’s sun-drenched sound stages, stealing scenes from Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as the icily calculating Madame Sebastian in *Notorious*. Between acts she collected two last names—first Geza Herczeg, then Alexander Strakosch—yet the camera always knew her simply by that unmistakable, regal poise. On a December evening in 1965, Vienna’s Hietzing district grew quieter still when Leopoldine Konstantin took her final bow at age seventy-nine, leaving behind a legacy stitched from celluloid, empire, and a century’s worth of spotlights.