Ressel Orla

Biography

A Viennese girl with eyes too wide for any proscenium arch, Ressel Orla stepped before the camera only when the theatres turned her away. The gamble paid off in 1914: *The Perfect Thirty-Six* made her an overnight prism for German movie-light. Between that debut and the Weimar twilight she flickered through dozens of roles, her pale, dramatic face—half-saint, half-siren—projecting emotions the silent lens loved to magnify. Fame arrived fast, departed faster; by the twenties the public had moved on, and so had the studios. Her celluloid after-image survives mainly in Fritz Lang’s two-part *The Spiders* (1919-20), where she slinks through opium lairs as Lio Sha, traitor to the last. When she died, still short of forty, the projectors had long since stopped turning for her.