German actor Conrad Veidt began his career at the age of 20 under the
guidance of Max Reinhardt at Berlin's Deutsches Theater. He rose to
worldwide prominence by way of his portrayal of the sleepwalker in silent
masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). His performance in The
Student of Prague (1926) led to a brief spell in Hollywood during the
mid-1920s, where he launched his American film career as the doddering
King Louis XI in The Beloved Rogue (1927) and featured as a hapless
young nobleman in the superbly grotesque The Man Who Laughs (1928).
Veidt returned to Germany in 1929 with the advent of sound films in
his native language, but fled for England in 1933 with his Jewish wife
when Hitler came to power.
In England, Veidt embarked on a productive period for Gaumont-British
Studios including Rome
Express (1932), I
was a Spy (1933) and The
Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), a moral fantasy about the
arrival of a saintly figure at a London boarding house. He later starred
in a pair of Powell-Pressburger thrillers; The
Spy in Black (1939) and Contraband
(1940), and played the evil Jaffar in the fantasy classic The
Thief of Bagdad (1940). As the possibility of German invasion rose,
Veidt was persuaded to move to Hollywood where he could aid the war
effort in safety. Of the films Veidt made in Hollywood before his death,
that of Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942) is by far his most
well known. Veidt died suddenly of a heart attack on a Los Angeles golf
course at the age of 50.
