Hollywood Refugees
by mjm2273 | created - 04 Nov 2013 | updated - 07 Apr 2020 | PublicActors, actresses, writers, directors and producers who fled Nazi Europe from 1928-1940
1. Marlene Dietrich
Soundtrack | Witness for the Prosecution
Her father was a police lieutenant and imbued in her a military attitude to life. Marlene was known in school for her "bedroom eyes" and her first affairs were at this stage in her life - a professor at the school was terminated. She entered the cabaret scene in 1920s Germany, first as a spectator ...
2. Billy Wilder
Writer | The Apartment
Originally planning to become a lawyer, Billy Wilder abandoned that career in favor of working as a reporter for a Viennese newspaper, using this experience to move to Berlin, where he worked for the city's largest tabloid. He broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929 and wrote scripts for many ...
3. Otto Preminger
Actor | Stalag 17
Otto Ludwig Preminger was born in Wiznitz, Bukovina, Austria-Hungary. His father was a prosecutor, and Otto originally intended to follow his father into a law career; however, he fell in love with the theater in his 20's and became one of the most imaginative stage producers and directors. He was ...
4. Ingrid Bergman
Actress | Casablanca
Ingrid Bergman was one of the greatest actresses from Hollywood's lamented Golden Era. Her natural and unpretentious beauty and her immense acting talent made her one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American cinema. Bergman is also one of the most Oscar-awarded actresses, tied with ...
5. Peter Lorre
Actor | M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder
Peter Lorre was born László Löwenstein in Rózsahegy in the Slovak area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the son of Hungarian Jewish parents. He learned both Hungarian and German languages from birth, and was educated in elementary and secondary schools in the Austria-Hungary capitol Vienna, but did ...
6. Fritz Lang
Actor | Le mépris
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. ...
7. Pola Negri
Actress | Bella Donna
Pola Negri was born in Lipno, Poland, and moved to Warsaw as a child. Living in poverty with her mother, a teenage Pola auditioned and was accepted to the Imperial Ballet. Due to an illness that ended her dancing career, she soon switched to the Warsaw Imperial Academy of Dramatic Arts and became ...
8. Sonja Henie
Actress | Sun Valley Serenade
The daughter of a fur wholesaler in Norway, Sonja Henie received her first pair of ice skates when she was six. At 14 she was the Norwegian Skating Champion. At 15 she would win the Olympic gold medal in Skating, a feat she would repeat in 1932 and 1936. In 1936 she would turn professional and tour...
9. Hedy Lamarr
Actress | Samson and Delilah
Hedy Lamarr, the woman many critics and fans alike regard as the most beautiful ever to appear in films, was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria. She was the daughter of Gertrud (Lichtwitz), from Budapest, and Emil Kiesler, a banker from Lemberg (now known as Lviv). Her parents were ...
10. Paul Henreid
Actor | Casablanca
Paul Henreid was born Paul Georg Julius Freiherr von Hernreid Ritter von Wasel-Waldingau in Trieste, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the son of Marie Luise Heilig (Lendecke) and Baron Karl Alphons Hernreid. His father was an aristocratic banker, who was born to a Jewish family whose surname ...
11. Max Reinhardt
Director | Sumurûn
Max Reinhardt was from an Austrian merchant family (surname officially changed from the family name Goldmann to Reinhardt in 1904), and even as a boy, after his family moved to Vienna, he haunted the "Hofburg Theater" and tried to see every play. In 1890 he studied at the Sulkowsky Theater in ...
12. Fred Zinnemann
Director | A Man for All Seasons
Initially grew up wanting to be a violinist, but while at the University of Vienna decided to study law. While doing so, he became increasingly interested in American film and decided that was what he wanted to do. He became involved in European filmaking for a short time before going to America to...
13. Robert Siodmak
Director | Nachts wenn der Teufel kam
Robert Siodmak (8 August 1900 - 10 March 1973) was a German-born, American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for a series of stylish, unpretentious Hollywood films noirs he made in the 1940s.
Siodmak (pronounced SEE-ODD-MACK) was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of ...
14. S.Z. Sakall
Actor | Casablanca
Hungarian-born S.Z. Sakall was a veteran of German, Hungarian and British films when he left Europe because of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. In Hollywood from shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Sakall began appearing in comedies and musicals, often playing a lovable if ...
15. Elisabeth Bergner
Actress | The Rise of Catherine the Great
Elisabeth Bergner was the daughter of the merchant Emil Ettel and his wife Anna Rosa Wagner. She grew up in Vienna, and she made her theatre debut in Innsbruck in 1915. In 1916 she obtained a contract in Zürich, where she played Ophelia next to the famous Alexander Moissi, who fell in love with her...
16. Felix Bressart
Actor | The Shop Around the Corner
With his lanky frame, big nose, toothbrush moustache and horn-rimmed glasses he looked like someone had decided to cross Groucho Marx with Albert Einstein. The perennial scene-stealer Felix Bressart had two distinct careers as a comic actor: an earlier one, on stage and screen in his native Germany...
17. Joe Pasternak
Producer | Peter
The son of an out-of-work bookkeeper, Pasternak arrived in the U.S. from Hungary in 1921. After working in a belt factory in Philadelphia, he moved to New York where he plucked chickens and worked in a cafeteria. Becoming increasingly infatuated with the film business, it didn't take him long to ...
18. Luise Rainer
Actress | The Great Ziegfeld
Luise Rainer, the first thespian to win back-to-back Oscars, was born on January 12, 1910 in Dusseldorf, Germany, into a prosperous Jewish family. Her parents were Emilie (Königsberger) and Heinrich Rainer, a businessman. She took to the stage, and plied her craft on the boards in Germany. As a ...
19. Kurt Weill
Soundtrack | Die Dreigroschenoper
Kurt Weill was born on March 2, 1900 in Dessau, Germany. He was a composer and writer, known for Three Penny Opera (1963), Knickerbocker Holiday (1944) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). He was married to Lotte Lenya. He died on April 3, 1950 in New York City, New York, USA.
20. Lotte Lenya
Actress | From Russia with Love
Lotte Lenya was a Tony Award-winning and Academy award-nominated actress and singer. While best remembered in the U.S. for her supporting role as Rosa Klebb in the classic Bond film From Russia with Love (1963), she is celebrated in Germany for her ground-breaking performances in the plays of Kurt ...
21. Franz Waxman
Composer | Sunset Boulevard
Franz Waxman (Wachsmann) pursued his dream of a career in music despite his family's misgivings. He worked for several years as a bank teller and paid for piano, harmony and composition lessons with his salary. He later moved to Berlin, where he continued his study and progress as a musician. He ...
22. Michael Curtiz
Director | Casablanca
Curtiz began acting in and then directing films in his native Hungary in 1912. After WWI, he continued his filmmaking career in Austria and Germany and into the early 1920s when he directed films in other countries in Europe. Moving to the US in 1926, he started making films in Hollywood for Warner...
23. Mártha Eggerth
Actress | La chanson du souvenir
From the day she was born Martha lived in a world of music. For sure her father was a banker but he was also an amateur pianist. As for her mother, she was a housewife but also a very talented opera singer who had given up her career for the joys of matrimony and motherhood. It does not come as a ...
24. Eva Gabor
Actress | Green Acres
Eva Gabor was born on February 11, 1919 in Budapest, Hungary, to Jolie Gabor (née Janka Tilleman) and Vilmos Gabor (born Farkas Miklós Grün), a soldier. Her older siblings were Magda Gabor, an actress, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, an actress and socialite. Her parents were both from Jewish families. She went...
25. Zsa Zsa Gabor
Actress | A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
Undoubtedly the woman who had come to epitomize what we recognize today as "celebrity," Zsa Zsa Gabor, is better known for her many marriages, personal appearances, her "dahlink" catchphrase, her actions, gossip, and quotations on men, rather than her film career.
Zsa Zsa was born as Sári Gabor on ...
26. Helmut Dantine
Actor | War and Peace
Actor/director/producer Helmut Dantine was born in Vienna, Austria on October 7, 1917. He made a name for himself as an actor during World War Two playing German soldiers and Nazi villains in Hollywood films, most notably in Mrs. Miniver (1942). The young Dantine was a fervent anti-fascist/...
27. Michèle Morgan
Actress | La symphonie pastorale
A classic beauty, blonde French actress Michèle Morgan was one of her country's most popular leading ladies for over five decades. Born Simone Renee Roussel on Leap Year Day (February 29) in 1920, she ran away from home as a teenager and studied acting under René Simon, beginning her film career at...
28. Conrad Veidt
Actor | Casablanca
Conrad Veidt attended the Sophiengymnasium (secondary school) in the Schoeneberg district of Berlin, and graduated without a diploma in 1912, last in his class of 13. Conrad liked animals, theater, cinema, fast cars, pastries, thunderstorms, gardening, swimming and golfing. He disliked heights, ...
29. Curt Bois
Actor | Der Himmel über Berlin
Curt had one of the longest careers in film history appearing in films at the age of 8, In 1933 he fled Germany to seek artistic freedom in New York where he quickly captivated audiences in his many stage appearances. After a few years Hollywood beckoned with the mot productive period of his career...
30. Walter Slezak
Actor | Lifeboat
Tall, portly Viennese character actor Walter Slezak simultaneously pursued two different careers after his arrival in America in 1930: one, as a star of musical comedy on the stage, and another, as a portrayer of villains, impish rogues or pompous buffoons on screen.
Walter was born in May 1902 in ...
31. Charles Boyer
Actor | Gaslight
Charles Boyer studied philosophy before he went to the theater where he gave his debut in 1920. Although he had at first no intentions to pursue a career at the movies (his first movie was Man of the Sea (1920) by Marcel L'Herbier) he used his chance in Hollywood after several filming stations all ...
32. Anna Sten
Actress | Devushka s korobkoy
Born in Russian Empire to a Ukrainian father and a Swedish mother, Anna Sten studied at the Russian Film Academy and joined the Moscow Art Theater. Strikingly beautiful, she went on to appear in a number of Russian silent films, but it was in the German film Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (1931)...
33. Simone Simon
Actress | Cat People
Diminutive, fiery-tempered Simone Simon was born in France, but spent much of her early childhood in Madagascar, where her father managed a graphite mine. Her schooling was somewhat unsettled, her family moving from city to city (Berlin, Budapest, Turin) before finally establishing themselves in ...
34. Fernand Gravey
Actor | The Great Waltz
One of director Alfred Machin's favorite actresses was Fernande Dépernay of the Théâtre des Galeries. Dépernay was married to Georges Mertens, another of Machin's regular actors. Their son, Fernand Mertens, born in 1904. He made his acting debut in 'Saïda Makes Off with Manneken Pis' and in 1914 ...
35. Annabella
Actress | Le million
At age 16, Annabella was chosen by Abel Gance to appear in Napoleon (1927). In the 30s, she became a star of French movies. She made movies in numerous other countries, before being called to Hollywood in 1938, where she met and married Tyrone Power. She remained in the USA until 1947. Then she ...
36. Olympe Bradna
Actress | Roger la Honte
Brunette leading lady of Czech, Austrian and German ancestry. Signed by Paramount in 1936. She was introduced with a famous publicity campaign, which instructed prospective American audiences to pronounce her first name 'O-lamp'. She was born on a Parisian backstage, in between a matinée and ...
37. Ilona Massey
Actress | Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Born on June 16, 1910, sultry, opulent, mole-lipped, Budapest-bred blonde singer/actress Ilona Massey survived an impoverished childhood in Hungary to become a glamorous talent both here and abroad. As a dressmaker's apprentice she managed to scrape up money together for singing lessons and first ...
38. Franciska Gaal
Actress | The Girl Downstairs
Franciska Gaal was born on February 1, 1904 in Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now Hungary]. She was an actress, known for The Girl Downstairs (1938), Little Mother (1935) and The Buccaneer (1938). She was married to Dajkovich, Ferenc and Lestyán, Sándor. She died on January 2, 1973 in New York City, ...
39. George Pal
Producer | The War of the Worlds
George Pal was born on February 1, 1908, in Cegled, Austria-Hungary. Later, when he was still a child, his stage-entertainer parents divorced, and he was raised by his grandparents.
In 1928, Pal graduated from the Budapest Academy of Arts with a degree in Architecture and highly developed drawing ...
40. Signe Hasso
Actress | Heaven Can Wait
Young Signe Larsson was only 12 when she started to work as a child extra at The Royal Dramatic Theater and was the youngest ever enrolled for acting studies there at 16. She quickly got leading roles in movies and always received very good reviews. In 1940 she went to Hollywood and signed a ...
41. Francis Lederer
Actor | One Rainy Afternoon
Frantisek Lederer was born on November 6th, 1899, in Czechoslovakia. His father was a leather merchant, and young Frantisek began his working life as a department store delivery boy in Prague. He fell in love with acting from a young age, and was soon on stage touring Moravia and then all over ...
42. Anton Walbrook
Actor | The Red Shoes
This dark, debonair, dashing and extremely distinguished Austrian actor was christened Adolf Wohlbrück in Vienna, the scion of a family of circus clowns. He broke away easily from generations of tradition as the circus life had no appeal whatsoever to Walbrook.
Trained by the legendary director Max ...
43. Douglas Sirk
Director | Schlußakkord
Film director Douglas Sirk, whose reputation blossomed in the generation after his 1959 retirement from Hollywood filmmaking, was born Hans Detlef Sierck on April 26, 1897, in Hamburg, Germany, to a journalist. Both of his parents were Danish, and the future director would make movies in German, ...
44. Vera Ralston
Actress | Storm Over Lisbon
After achieving modest fame as an ice skater in her native Czechoslovakia, Vera Hruba was brought to the United States by Republic Pictures head Herbert J. Yates, who hoped to turn her into the next Sonja Henie. After featuring her in two "Ice Capades" movies, he added "Ralston" to her name and ...
45. Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Composer | The Adventures of Robin Hood
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the son of a well-known music critic. A child prodigy, he accompanied his father in playing four-handed piano arrangements by the age of five. By the age of eleven he drew his first plaudits from enthusiastic Viennese audiences (including the emperor Franz Josef) with ...
46. Friedrich Hollaender
Music_department | Sabrina
Friedrich Hollaender was the son of the composer Victor Hollaender, who composed shows in Berlin in the 1890s to 1910s. Frederick received early musical training, since 1913 he was student of opera composer Engelbert Humperdinck (who composed Hänsel und Gretel). He started as repetitor at a theater...
47. Henry Koster
Director | Harvey
Henry Koster was born Herman Kosterlitz in Berlin, Germany, on May 1, 1905. His maternal grandfather was a famous operatic tenor Julius Salomon (who died of tuberculosis in the 1880s). His father was a salesman of ladies unmentionables who left the family while Henry was at a young age, leaving him...
48. Rudi Fehr
Editor | Prizzi's Honor
Rudi Fehr was born on July 6, 1911 in Berlin, Germany. He was an editor and producer, known for Prizzi's Honor (1985), Key Largo (1948) and Dial M for Murder (1954). He was married to Maris Wrixon. He died on April 16, 1999 in Hollywood, California, USA.
49. Oscar Homolka
Actor | The Seven Year Itch
Because of his heavy generically "European" accent and Slavic-sounding surname (not an uncommon one among Czechs or Slovaks), many people assumed Oscar Homolka was Eastern European or Russian. In fact, he was born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary), the multicultural capital of a large multi-ethnic ...
50. Victor Borge
Actor | Higher and Higher
Pianist, composer, songwriter, entertainer and actor, educated at Borgerdydskolen and the Conservatory of Copenhagen. He studied with Egon Petri and Frederic Lammond. His concert career began in 1922, and he performed in a musical revue in 1934, and in films by 1937. Arriving in the US in 1940, he ...
51. Victor Francen
Actor | Hold Back the Dawn
Victor Francen was born on August 5, 1888 in Tienen, Flanders, Belgium. He was an actor, known for Hold Back the Dawn (1941), Hell and High Water (1954) and I Accuse (1938). He was married to Mary Marquet, Renée Corciade and Eleanor Kreutzer. He died on November 18, 1977 in Aix-en-Provence, ...
52. Fernand Gravey
Actor | The Great Waltz
One of director Alfred Machin's favorite actresses was Fernande Dépernay of the Théâtre des Galeries. Dépernay was married to Georges Mertens, another of Machin's regular actors. Their son, Fernand Mertens, born in 1904. He made his acting debut in 'Saïda Makes Off with Manneken Pis' and in 1914 ...
53. Miliza Korjus
Actress | The Great Waltz
Miliza's father was Arthur Korjus, a lieutenant colonel in the Imperial Russian Army and later Chief of Staff to the War Minister of Estonia. The Estonian branch of her family was of Swedish descent, having settled in Estonia during the middle of the seventeenth century when the country was ruled ...
54. Madeleine Lebeau
Actress | Casablanca
Madeleine Lebeau was born on June 10, 1923 in Antony, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France. She was an actress, known for Casablanca (1942), 8½ (1963) and Gentleman Jim (1942). She was married to Tullio Pinelli and Marcel Dalio. She died on May 1, 2016 in Estepona, Malaga, Spain.
55. Fritz Feld
Actor | Bringing Up Baby
Fritz Feld was born on October 15, 1900 in Berlin, Germany. He was an actor and production manager, known for Bringing Up Baby (1938), Hello, Dolly! (1969) and Out Where the Stars Begin (1938). He was married to Virginia Christine and Idea Wickham Von Koppen. He died on November 18, 1993 in Los ...
56. Carl Esmond
Actor | From the Earth to the Moon
Born Willy Eichberger in Vienna, Austria, he changed his name to the ethnically nondescript Carl Esmond and went on to become a well-regarded actor both here and in Europe, a career that sustained itself for nearly 50 years. He initially studied drama in Vienna at the State Academy of Dramatic Arts...
57. Mady Christians
Actress | Heidi
Mady Christians was born in Vienna, Austria. Destined to be in films in both Germany and the US, she started out as a stage actress but soon found new challenges in the world of cinema. Her first film was at the age of 24 when she appeared in Audrey (1916). She remained in German films for the next...
58. Salka Viertel
Actress | Seven Faces
Salka Viertel was born on June 15, 1889 in Sambor, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Sambir, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine]. She was a writer and actress, known for Seven Faces (1929), Anna Christie (1930) and Deep Valley (1947). She was married to Berthold Viertel. She died on October 20, 1978 in Klosters, ...
59. Peter van Eyck
Actor | The Longest Day
With his whitish blond crew-cut, slow, menacing drawl and Germanic manner, Van Eyck was destined to be typecast as stereotypically scowling, arrogant Nazi officers. This was ironic, because he was an avowed anti-fascist who had left Germany in 1931 -- two years before Adolf Hitler came to power. ...
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