Victor Trivas

Biography

Writer/director Victor Trivas is said to have worked with legendary Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, but some say that is an unconfirmed legend, as is his birth in Russia. Other sources say he was born to Hungarian parents in Switzerland, where he graduated with a degree in architecture. In the mid-'20s he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a scenarist on The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927). His directorial debut came with Hell on Earth (1931), which had a pacifist message that provoked political turmoil; the film was banned, confiscated and destroyed by Nazi authorities in 1940, and Trivas had to take refuge, first in Paris and, as the Nazi occupation engulfed France, in the US. Nominated for an Oscar for writing the script of Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946), Trivas returned to Germany in 1959, from where he worked on-and-off in other American film productions.