Torben Meyer | |
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in Casablanca (1942)
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Born |
Torben Emil Meyer 1 December 1884 Copenhagen, Denmark |
Died | 22 May 1975 Hollywood, California, U.S. |
(aged 90)
Occupation | Actor |
Years active | 1912—1966 |
Torben Emil Meyer (1 December 1884 – 22 May 1975) was a Danish character actor who appeared in more than 190 films in a 55-year career.
Meyer was born in Aarhus, Denmark and began his career as a stage actor in Denmark. He appeared in his first silent movie, Vor tids dame in 1912 and made twenty more before making Don Quixote in 1926. This movie achieved considerable international stature, and Meyer followed the migration of leading European actors to Hollywood the following year. His first American role was as a spy in the silent movie The Man Who Laughs starring Conrad Veidt in 1928. Meyer arrived just when the transition to sound was in progress. In contrast to many other European-born actors, his thick accent became an asset for him. He appeared uncredited in numerous movies throughout the 1930s and 1940s, almost always cast as a German.
In 1930, Meyer received a small part in a Michael Curtiz film A Soldier's Plaything, and in 1932, Meyer appeared in two Swedish language American films, Trådlöst och kärleksfullt and Halvvägs till Himlen. Later that year, he had a small part in Murders in the Rue Morgue, based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story which starring Bela Lugosi.
Meyer had small parts as waiters in five different movies during 1932; in German émigré director Ernst Lubitsch's film Broken Lullaby starring Lionel Barrymore, in George Cukor's What Price Hollywood?, where he plays a waiter in the famous Hollywood restaurant 'The Brown Derby', in Downstairs starring Paul Lukas, in Mervyn LeRoy's Big City Blues starring Joan Blondell and in The Match King. Also that year, he had a small part in The Animal Kingdom starring Leslie Howard.