Ressel Orla
actress
- Born:
- 1889-05-18, Bozen, Tyrol, Austria-Hungary [now Bozen, Italy]
- Died:
- 1931-07-23, Berlin, Germany
- Professions:
- actress
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.
Filmography
In the vault (6)
