Greta Gynt

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Greta Gynt , born in Margrethe Woxholt (born November 15, 1916 in Oslo , Norway , † April 2, 2000 in London , United Kingdom ), was a British dancer and film actress whose main activity was Great Britain.

Live and act

Margrethe "Grete" Woxholt grew up shortly after the end of the First World War in London, where her parents had temporarily moved, and received dance training there at the age of five. The family later returned to Oslo with her and their son, who was born in 1926 and later became cameraman Egil Woxholt . It was here that Grete gained her first professional experience as a dancer at the “Chat Noir” revue stage. When she was not quite 18 she got her first film role as Grete Woxholt in neighboring Sweden. Since the mother suspected better career opportunities for her daughter in London, Grete returned to the British capital with a letter of recommendation from Fox Film.

At the beginning of 1935, Greta Woxholt made her British film debut and since 1937 has been offered a plethora of supporting supporting and leading roles in British entertainment films, now under the stage name Greta Gynt. Most of them were cheap romances and comedies, as well as dramas, crime stories and thrillers. Neither of these films has any film historical significance, but made the Norwegian quite popular in England in the 1930s and 1940s. Greta Gynt received a rare horror film role in 1939 at the side of the American genre star Bela Lugosi in the horror story The Strangler . Immediately after the outbreak of war in 1939, this film marked her final breakthrough as a film star in the British Isles. From then on she was often cast as a femme fatale , a role typification that she was uncomfortable with in the end.

Interesting and, above all, more substantial roles followed during the war: Gynt was the French Resistance leader in the occupation drama Tomorrow We Live (1942) and the "half-Jewish" night club singer Elsie Silver, who played in Mr. Emmanuel (1944) the old English who gave the title Helping Jews out of Nazi custody when visiting Germany in 1936. Greta Gynt's popularity peaked in the first few years immediately after World War II, when she played leading roles in crime films such as The Perfect Murderer (as an unfaithful wife and spouse killer ), comedies like Toto-Glück (where she played a seductive nightclub singer) and melodramas such as Decision in Ascot , where she could be seen as the faithless bride of a racehorse owner, played.

In 1950 Greta Gynt went to Hollywood, but the result, Three on Adventure , was unsatisfactory despite prominent colleagues ( Stewart Granger , David Niven and Walter Pidgeon ) and brought no further US offers. Back in England, she only appeared in petty B-movies and as a guest star in a few television series before she gradually retired from acting towards the end of the same decade, along with her marriage to her fourth husband, Frederick Moore, a surgeon.

Filmography

  • 1934: Sången till henne
  • 1935: It Happened in Paris
  • 1937: Boys Will Be Girls
  • 1937: The Last Curtain
  • 1938: Second Best Bed
  • 1938: The Last Barricade
  • 1939: The Arsenal Stadium Mystery
  • 1939: The Strangler ( The Dark Eyes of London )
  • 1939: Bulldog Sees It Through
  • 1940: Two for Danger
  • 1940: Room for Two
  • 1941: Crook's Tour
  • 1941: The Common Touch
  • 1942: Tomorrow We Live
  • 1943: It's That Man Again
  • 1944: Mr. Emmanuel
  • 1946: Paradise of Love ( London Town )
  • 1947: The Perfect Murderer ( Dear Murderer )
  • 1947: The Saving Song ( Take My Life )
  • 1947: Toto-Glück ( Easy Money )
  • 1948: Decision in Ascot ( The Calendar )
  • 1948: Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill
  • 1950: Count Orloff's dangerous love ( Shadow of the Eagle )
  • 1950: Secret Service Strikes ( I'll Get You for This )
  • 1951: La rivale dell'imperatrice
  • 1951: Three adventure ( Soldiers Three )
  • 1952: Whispering Smith Hits London
  • 1952: The strangler arrives at midnight ( The Ringer )
  • 1953: Three Steps in the Dark
  • 1954: The Last Moment
  • 1954: Night at Devils point ( Devil's Point )
  • 1954: Forbidden Cargo
  • 1955: See How They Run
  • 1955: The Blue Peter
  • 1956: My Wife's Family
  • 1957: By a thread ( Fortune Is a Woman )
  • 1957: Morning Call
  • 1959: The privy ( The Witness )
  • 1959: Ten women disappeared in Paris ( Bluebeard's Ten Honeymoons )
  • 1963: The Runaway

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary in The Guardian

literature

  • Ephraim Katz : The Film Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. Revised by Fred Klein and Ronald Dean Nolen. New York 2001, p. 575

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Gynt, Greta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woxholt, Margrethe (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British dancer and film actress with her main focus in Great Britain
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Oslo , Norway
DATE OF DEATH April 2, 2000
Place of death London , UK