Fritz Valk

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Fritz Valk , in the English emigration Frederick Valk (born June 10, 1895 in Hamburg , German Empire , † July 23, 1956 in London , United Kingdom ), was a German-Czech-British actor on stage and film.

Live and act

The early years in Germany

Valk came to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in his hometown Hamburg in 1914 without training. He then had to do his military service for three years and was only able to continue his theater career in Hamburg in the 1918/19 season. His next engagement took him to Lübeck from 1919 to 1921, before going to the theater in Darmstadt for three seasons (from 1921 to 1924). In 1924 Leopold Jessner brought him to the Prussian State Theater in Berlin. During this time, Valk also made his film debut (starring old Hartmann in Hagar's Son ), followed by a tiny role in GW Pabst's Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney . In 1928 Fritz Valk returned to Darmstadt, but only stayed there for one season and in 1929 went to the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Shortly before the Nazis came to power, Valk left Germany and went to Prague, where he found an engagement at the local German Theater for the 1932/33 season. After the Wehrmacht marched into Prague (1939), Valk, who by then had Czech citizenship, fled to England.

Emigration to England

Due to this fact, when the war broke out at the beginning of September 1939, he was not interned as an enemy alien, but was given the opportunity, now under the Anglicised name Frederick Valk, to play cliché Nazis of all kinds in a series of British propaganda films, some with tiny roles. His most famous film part, however, was the analyst of a mind-split ventriloquist in 1945 in the horror story Dream Without End . At the beginning of the 1950s, Valk returned to old fairways and played twice a pompous Nazi, this time a camp commandant in the Albert RN war stripes and in the shadow of the citadel . In his other British film as well as television roles, Valk was mostly limited to the type of a scary, unsympathetic or dangerous foreigner, even if he had had British citizenship since 1947. For a ministerial role in the American musician biography Frauen around Richard Wagner , Valk returned to Germany in autumn 1954 after many years.

Immediately after his arrival in Great Britain, Frederick Valk continued his stage work intensively, starting with Robert Ardrey's play Thunder Rock (season 1939/40 at the Arts Theater in London with the young Alec Guinness ). From 1941 he appeared repeatedly at London's Old Vic Theater . In 1942 Valk excelled there for the first time as Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and was critically acclaimed. The following year he also received the leading role of Othello in the Shakespeare drama of the same name. In May 1947 Valk took part in a Shakespeare month at the Savoy Theater, in 1949 he was seen at the capital's Lyric Theater in Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness at the side of Stewart Granger . A year later, in turn, he appeared in Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie in a performance at London's Q Theater. After further engagements at London's Cambridge Theater (1951) and the Westminster Theater (1953), Frederick Valk went on tour with the Shylock to Canada, where he declared himself to be his favorite role in 1955 after the Canadian Jewish Congress because of the alleged anti-Semitic orientation of this production had lodged the sharpest protest. In 1956 Valk gave his farewell performance at the Piccadilly Theater in London: There he could be seen in Peter Ustinov's play Romanoff and Juliet at the side of Eric Portman . Valk received a lot of praise for his theatrical work: In 1946 he received the Ellen Terry Award for Best Actor for his acting performance in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov .

Filmography

Radio plays

literature

  • Frank Arnau (Ed.): Universal Filmlexikon 1933, D 54.Berlin 1933
  • London Calling. Germans in British film of the thirties . A CineGraph book. Editor: Jörg Schöning. S. 146. Munich 1993 (here wrong year of birth 1901)
  • Frederick Valk Dies - Best Actor of 1946 . Obituary in The Glasgow Herald, July 24, 1956
  • Valk, Fritz , in: Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945 . Munich: Saur, 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 373
  • Valk, Fritz , in: Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933–1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 1188

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Second Chance: Two Centuries of German-speaking Jews in the United Kingdom at books.google.co.uk
  2. ^ Jewish Actor Defends Role Of Shylock in Ottawa Citizen of May 21, 1955
personal data
SURNAME Valk, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Valk, Frederick (only in England)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Czech-British theater and film actor
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1956
Place of death London , UK