Willy Fritsch
| Willy Fritsch | |
|---|---|
Photography by Alexander Binder, about 1927
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| Born |
Wilhelm Egon Fritz Fritsch 27 January 1901 Kattowitz, German Empire |
| Died | 13 July 1973 (aged 72) Hamburg, West Germany |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1921–1964 |
| Spouse(s) | Dinah Grace (d. 1963) |
Willy Fritsch (27 January 1901 – 13 July 1973) was a German theater and film actor, a popular leading man and character actor from the silent-film era to the early 1960s.
He was born Wilhelm Egon Fritz Fritsch, the son of a factory owner in Kattowitz (present-day Katowice) in the Prussian province of Silesia. After the bankruptcy of his father in 1912, the family moved to Berlin, where Fritsch sr. worked as an employee of the Siemens-Schuckert company. Young Willy originally planned an apprenticeship as a mechanic, but soon resorted to the occupation as an extra at the Großes Schauspielhaus theatre.
From 1919 he attended Max Reinhardt's drama school at the Deutsches Theater, where he debuted with small roles, and made his feature debut in films as a supporting player in 1921's Miß Venus. In 1925, Fritsch gained international attention by playing the leading character in A Waltz Dream directed by Ludwig Berger. Afterwards he was offered a United Artists contract but refused to move to the United States due to his lack of English language knowledge. At the end of the 1920s, Fritsch was also starring at two action films directed by Fritz Lang, Spies and Woman in the Moon where he played serious characters. However, his break through came as a juvenile lover after being paired with either Käthe von Nagy (i.e. in Billy Wilder's script debut Her Grace Commands, 1931) or Lilian Harvey, when they appeared regularly together in UFA movies like The Three from the Filling Station (1930) or Congress Dances by Erik Charell (1931), released almost every year thereafter until Harvey's emigration in 1939. He mainly starred in the German versions and was often replaced by Henri Garat until his movies were dubbed during the mid-1930s. Fritsch was married to artistic dancer Dinah Grace in 1937 and became a father of two sons. The younger one, Thomas Fritsch, is a successful actor as well.
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