Mauritz Stiller

Biography

Helsinki, 17 July 1883: Moshe “Mauritz” Stiller enters the world, already rehearsing gestures he would later project onto silver screens. At sixteen he trades schoolbooks for greasepaint, racking up eighty-seven stage roles before the Great War even begins and staging sixteen of his own directorial visions between 1911 and 1928. In 1912 Charles Magnusson, the Midas of AB Svenska Biografteatern, lures Stiller—and fellow stage titan Viktor Sjöström—into the flickering new art of film. The newcomer hits the ground sprinting: six features completed before his first anniversary on the lot. Soon “Herr Arnes pengar” (1919), “Erotikon” (1920) and the epoch-making “Gösta Berlings saga” (1923) anchor Sweden’s cinematic identity; in the last of these, an eighteen-year-old Greta Garbo steps from the snowdrifts into history. Mentor and muse become inseparable, a two-person repertory company of ambition and glamour. Stiller shepherds Garbo to Berlin in 1925; the next year they cross the Atlantic to shoot “The Temptress” for Irving Thalberg at Paramount. Between 1912 and 1927 Stiller signs fifty-one features as director and slips in front of the lens for seven acting cameos. Stockholm, 8 November 1928, 1:05 a.m.: after a gauntlet of surgeries, a renegade lung abscess calls the final curtain. The projector stops, the house lights rise, but the afterglow of Stiller’s images keeps spooling through Nordic memory.