Lil Dagover

Lil Dagover
Lil Dagover in the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Born	Marie Antonia Siegelinde Martha Seubert (1887-09-30)30 September 1887 Madiun, Java, Dutch East Indies
Died	January 23, 1980 (aged 92) Munich, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1913–1976
Spouse(s)	Fritz Daghofer (1917–1919) Georg Witt (1926–1972)
Children	Eva Maria Daghofer (b. 1919)

Lil Dagover (30 September 1887 – January 23, 1980) was a German stage, film and television actress whose career spanned between 1913 and 1979. She one of the most popular and recognized film actresses in the Weimar Republic.

Lil Dagover was born Marie Antonia Siegelinde Martha Liletts in Madiun, Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to German parents. Her father, Adolf Karl Ludwig Moritz Seubert, born in Karlsruhe/Baden Germany, was a forest ranger in the service of the Dutch colonial authorities. When she was ten, her parents sent her back to Europe to continue her education in boarding schools in Baden-Baden, Weimar and Geneva, Switzerland. Orphaned at the age of 13, she spent the rest of her adolescence with friends and relatives.

After completing her education she began pursuing a career as a stage actress around the principal cities of Europe. In 1917 she married actor Fritz Daghofer, who was fifteen years her senior. The couple divorced in 1919 and the union produced a daughter, Eva Marie, born the year of the divorce. Seubert began using a variant of her ex-husband's surname as a professional moniker – changing the spelling of 'Daghofer' to 'Dagover'.

Lil Dagover made her screen début in a 1913 film by director Louis Held. During her brief marriage to Fritz Daghofer, she was introduced to several notable film directors; among them Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang. Lang would cast Dagover in the role of 'O-Take-San' in the 1919 exotic drama Harakiri which would prove to be Dagover's breakout role. The following year, she would be directed by Robert Wiene in the German Expressionist horror classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, from a script by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz opposite actors Werner Krauss and Conrad Veidt. Lang would direct Dagover in three more films: 1919's Die Spinnen (English title: Spiders), 1921's Der Müde Tod (English release titles: Destiny and Behind The Wall), and 1922's Dr. Mabuse der Spieler.