KORTNER, Fritz

Born: Fritz Nathan Kohn in Vienna, Austria, 12 May 1892. Education: Studied at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Vienna. Family: Married the actress Johanna Hofer, son: Peter Kortner. Career: Actor in Mannheim and Hamburg; 1911—joined Max Reinhardt's theater, Berlin; achieved star status with his performance in Die Wandlund, 1919, and became a leading actor-director in German-language theater; 1915—film debut in Manya, Die Türkin; 1918—film directing debut with Gregor Marold; 1933—left Germany with rise of Nazis and found refuge in New York after stays in Vienna, Prague, and London; wrote two Broadway plays and worked as actor and screenwriter in Hollywood; returned to Germany after the war and regained his stage reputation. Awards: Deutscher Filmpreis for career, 1966. Died: Of leukemia in Munich, 25 July 1970.

Films as Actor:

1915

Die grosse Gafahr (Sauer); Im Banne der Vergangenheit (Piel); Manya, die Türkin (Piel); Police Nr. 1111 (Piel)

1916

Das zweite Leben

1917

Der Brief einer Toten (Friesler)

1918

Die andere Ich (Friesler) (as Professor); Frauenehre (Kundert) (as Jagdehilfe); Sonnwendhof (Leyde); Der Stärkere (Wiene)

1919

Satanas (Murnau); Das Auge des Buddha (Mondet) (as Indian servant); Ohne Zeugen (Baron and Kundert)

1920

Die Brüder Karamasoff (The Brothers Karamazov) (Buchowetzki and Froelich); Katherina die Grosse (Catherine the Great) (Schünzel) (as Potemkin); Weltbrand (Gad); Danton (All for a Woman) (Buchowetzki); Das Haus zum Mond (Martin); Der Schädel der Pharoanentochter (Tollen); Die Lieblingsfrau des Maharadscha (Mack); Die Nacht der Königin Isabeau (Wiene); Gerechtigkeit (Lux)

1921

Hintertreppe (Backstairs) (Jessner); Am roten Kliff (Henning); Aus dem Schwarzbuch eines Polizeikommissars (Hanus); Der Eisenbahnkönig (Illès); Die Verschwörung zu Genua (Leni); Landstrasse und Gross-stadt (Wilhelm)

1922

Peter der Grosse (Peter the Great) (Buchowetzki); Am Rande der Gross-stadt (Kobe); Der Graf von Essex (Felner); Der Ruf des Schicksals (Guter); Die Finsternis und ihr Eigentum (Hartwig); Luise Millerin (Froelich); Sterbende Völker (Reinert)

1923

Schatten (Warning Shadows) (Robison); Arme Sünderin (Gariazzo); Nora (Viertel)

1924

Armes kleines Mädchen (Kayser); Dr. Wislizenus (Kobe); Moderne Ehen (Otto)

1925

Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac) (Wiene) (as Nera)

1926

Dürfen wir schweigen (Oswald)

1927

Beethoven (The Life of Beethoven) (Löwenstein) (title role); Maria Stuart (Feher) (as Bothwell); Mata Hari (Mata Hari, the Red Dancer) (Feher); Primanerliebe (Land); Alpentragödie (Land); Die Ausgestossenen (Gerger); Die Geliebte des Gouverneurs (Feher) (+ co-sc); Mein Leben für das Deine (Morat); Revolutions-hochzeit (The Last Night) (Sandberg); Die Frau auf der Folter (A Scandal in Paris); Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora's Box) (Pabst) (as Dr. Schön); Frau Sorge (Land)

1929

Die Frau, nach der Mann sich sehnt (Three Loves) (Bernhardt); Atlantik (Dupont); Giftgas (Dubson); Die Nacht des Schreckens (Righelle); Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (Tourneur); Die Frau im Talar (Trotz); Somnambul (Trotz)

1930

Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Case) (Oswald) (title role); Menschen in Käfig (Love Storm) (Dupont); Der Andere (Wiene) (dual role); Die grosse Sehnsucht (Szekely)

1931

Der Mörder Dmitri Karamasoff (The Murderer Dimitri Karamazov) (Ozep) (title role)

1932

Danton (Behrendt) (title role)

1934

Chu Chin Chow (Forde) (as Abu Hassan); Evensong (Saville) (as Kober)

1935

Abdul the Damned (Grune) (title role); The Crouching Beast (Hanbury) (as Ahmed Bey)

1936

Midnight Menace (Bombs over London) (Hill) (as Peters)

1943

The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (Hagan) (as Marbach, + sc)

1944

The Hitler Gang (Farrow) (as Otto Strasser)

1946

The Wife of Monte Cristo (Ulmer); Somewhere in the Night (Mankiewicz); The Razor's Edge (Goulding) (as Kosti)

1947

The Brasher Doubloon (Brahm)

1948

Berlin Express (Tourneur); The Vicious Circle (The Woman in Brown) (Wilder)

1949

Der Ruf (The Last Illusion) (von Maky) (+ sc)

1950

Epilog (Käutner)

1952

Blaubart (Christian-Jacque) (as Haushofmeister); Die Stimme des Anderen (Engel) (+ co-sc)

Films as Director:

1918

Gregor Marold

1919

Else von Erlenhof

1931

Der brave Sünder (The Upright Sinner) (+ co-sc)

1932

So ein Mädel vergisst man nicht (+ co-sc)

1955

Die Stadt ist voller Geheimnisse (City of Secrets; Secrets of the City) (+ co-sc); Sarajevo

1960

Die Sendung der Lysistrata (for TV)

Publications

By KORTNER: book—

Alle Tage Abend, 1960.

On KORTNER: books—

Fritz Kortner, Berlin, 1970.

Brand, Matthias, Fritz Kortnerin der WeimarerRepublik: Annäherungsversuche an dieEntwicklung einesjüdischen Schauspielers in Deutschland, Rheinfelden, 1981.

Völker, Klaus, Fritz Kortner: Schauspieler und Regisseur , Berlin, 1987.

On KORTNER: articles—

Film Dope (London), January 1985.

Kasten, J., "Die Sehnsucht der Faune," in Filmwaerts (Hannover), May 1992.

Fritz Kortner, like his contemporary Conrad Veidt and the slightly older Emil Jannings, was associated with Max Reinhardt's Berlin theater in the years before and after World War I, and like them he became an important stage actor, combining a stage and a film career. His long life allowed him to continue after World War II as a leading, if often controversial, figure on the German-language stage.

His acting had a wider range than that of Werner Krauss, though like Krauss he was often cast in important parts in the expressionist films of the 1920s. He could be flamboyant (as in Warning Shadows), or more contained, as Lotte Eisner's description of him in Backstairs indicates: "Everything is motivated: the slow reactions of a poor indecisive man scared of love, the hesitations of an outcast of fortune who, having won his happiness by dint of guile, stops wanting to believe in it. . . . This instinctively Expressionistic actor blends into the setting." But he was also able to play such characters as Dr. Schön in Pandora's Box, Beethoven, Dmitri Karamazov, Bothwell, and Dreyfus.

England failed to recognize his ability when he went into exile after Hitler's taking power in Germany, and he acted in such minor films as Chu Chin Chow and Abdul the Damned; he had slightly better luck in the United States. After World War II he made a few films in Germany, but concentrated on stage work.

—George Walsh

Kortner, Fritz (1892–1970), Austrian actor, who after some experience in the provinces achieved an immediate success in Berlin in 1919 as the obsessed young hero of Toller's Die Wandlung (Transfiguration). In the same year he consolidated his position with a satanic, sadistic portrayal of Gessler in Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, and in the 1920s he established himself as the ideal interpreter of the new Expressionism, beginning at this time a long and fruitful partnership with the director Jessner. After playing the title-roles in Richard III and Wedekind's Der Marquis von Keith, in which he used a rapid, high-pressure delivery exploiting the strident power of his voice, he began in 1921, in Othello, to make use of quieter and more controlled speech, with greater variety of gesture. This new realism was apparent in his Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Shylock, as well as in Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman in 1923 and Sophocles' Oedipus the King in 1929. He left Germany in 1933 and played small parts in a number of American films, returning home in 1949. Working mainly in Berlin and Munich, he then became one of the most important directors in post-war Germany with a series of meticulously detailed productions. Notable among them were plays by Shakespeare and Molière, Strindberg's The Father in 1950, Beckett's En attendant Godot in 1953, and such German classics as Schiller's Kabale und Liebe in 1965, Goethe's Clavigo in 1969, and Lessing's Emilia Galotti in the year of his death.