Robert Fischer

Biography

Born in the amber-scented port of Danzig on 28 May 1881—when the city still answered to Prussia—Robert Fischer stepped onto the stage just as the flicker of moving pictures began to steal audiences from gas-lit theatres. His face first found the camera in 1919’s silent parable Heart of Gold, and within a decade he was seducing talkie-era crowds in Loves of an Actress (1928) and later trading barbed vows in Expensive Husbands (1937). Ninety-one years after that first breath beside the Baltic, he drew his last in sun-washed San Diego, California, on 11 March 1973, leaving behind a celluloid trail that spanned empires and eras.