Victor Arnold
actor
- Born:
- 1873-10-09, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now Austria]
- Died:
- 1914-10-16, Dresden, Germany
- Professions:
- actor
Biography
A squat, bullet-headed Viennese whirlwind, Victor Arnold exploded onto Berlin’s cabaret-scented boards around 1912, turning every shortcoming—his stature, his mug, his waistline—into punch-lines that left audiences wheezing. It was Arnold who spotted a gangly kid named Ernst Lubitsch loitering outside Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, dragged him indoors, and barked, “Forget Hamlet, make ’em laugh!” The two soon shared the screen in 1914’s whirlwind farces *The Perfect Thirty-Six* and *The Pride of the Firm*, and Arnold slipped into billowing robes for an early, now-lost staging of *Sumurun*, the Arabian-night tale Lubitsch would later immortalize. Between gigs he sparred verbally with Reinhardt and swapped gags with Felix Hollaender, sharpening Berlin’s comic edge. But as Europe’s lights dimmed toward war, the laughter curdled; depression caged the clown. Committed to a sanatorium that autumn, Arnold found silence unbearable; one October day in 1914 he opened his own veins and bled out the last of the city’s mirth.
