Gustav Diessl

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Gustav Diessl by Binder.jpg

Gustav Karl Balthasar Diessl (born December 30, 1899 in Vienna ; † March 20, 1948 there ) was an Austrian actor .

Live and act

Gustav Diessl was the son of a classical philologist and studied sculpture and painting at the Vienna School of Applied Arts . In 1916 he gained his first acting experience on the stages of Vienna. Diessl had to interrupt this activity, however, because he was drafted into the kuk mountain troops in the First World War . After his return from captivity, he began training as a set designer, which he broke off to turn to acting. In 1919 he joined a touring stage, followed by his first engagement at the Neue Wiener Bühne in 1921. In the same year he stood in front of the camera for the first time for a film for the small Viennese production company Dreamland-Film : in Carl Froelich's adventure film Im Banne der Kralle , he played an engineer alongside Eugen Jensen . In the mid-1920s Diessl went to Berlin , where he took part in two films by GW Pabst : in the marriage drama Abwege (1928) he played a lawyer who neglected his wife (played by Brigitte Helm ) out of professional ambition , and in the Wedekind film version The Pandora's Box (1928/29) he appeared alongside Louise Brooks as Jack the Ripper . He then stood in front of the camera for Fyodor Ozep's German-Soviet coproduction The Living Leichnam , a production by the proletarian Berlin-based Prometheus Film .

Gustav Diessl was very successful in 1929 in the high mountain drama The White Hell from Piz Palü , staged by Arnold Fanck and GW Pabst , which was initially produced as a silent film and then re-released in 1935 with a subsequently created soundtrack. In it, Diessl played an academic whose young wife fell into a crevasse while climbing together, and who later sacrificed herself to save the lives of a young couple ( Leni Riefenstahl , Ernst Petersen ) in mountain difficulties . Diessl's art of representation fell out of the scope of the conventional because he played mature, calm, fundamentally reliable, but often somewhat introverted or complex male characters with sex appeal . In his time he was the prototype of the somewhat difficult man who attracts women against his will, precisely because he is so complicated and so difficult to conquer. In The White Hell on Piz Palü, for example, Maria Majoni (Leni Riefenstahl) only falls in love with him because he is a bitter loner and initially hardly takes notice of her as a woman. On the other hand, the depths of his characters and his lack of transparency often qualified Diessl to interpret criminal types.

The first sound film in which Gustav Diessl took part was Pabst's anti-war film Western Front 1918 in 1930 . Diessl played one of four unequal war comrades who were all overwhelmed by the horrors of the First World War - Diessl from the infidelity of his lonely wife at home. Next to it, Diessl stood with stars like Lil Dagover ( Die Ehe , 1929), Henny Porten ( Mutterliebe , 1929), Hans Albers ( Hans in allen Gassen , 1930), Gustaf Gründgens ( participant does not answer , 1932) and again and again Brigitte Helm in front of the Camera. The last time he worked with GW Pabst was in 1932 for the production of the film Die Herrin von Atlantis , in which Diessl can be seen in the role of a colonial soldier who is the only man to resist the seductive power of the mysterious female title character (Brigitte Helm). This film was produced by the renowned Berlin-based Nero-Film , which Diessl used again immediately afterwards, in Fritz Lang's film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932/33), in which he played a gangster willing to quit who successfully tried to get out of the compulsion of the demonic wire-puller Dr. Free Mabuse. Arnold Fanck's adventure film SOS Eisberg (1932/1933), which was cast in the leading roles similar to The White Hell from Piz Palü , and the mountain film The White Majesty (1933) tried to build on the success of The White Hell from Piz Palü .

Despite his repeated collaboration with production companies such as Nero-Film and Prometheus Film , which represented bastions against the emerging National Socialism in the cultural world of their time , Diessl remained a sought-after actor beyond 1933. Diessl had already shown in earlier films that he was also convincing as the actor of eerie and difficult-to-understand foreigners. In Karl Green 's exotic drama The Yellow House of King-Fu (1931) z. B. he embodied a demonic Chinese villain. During the Nazi era he was portrayed as a foreigner more often, first in 1936 in Arthur Maria Rabenalt's German-Italian coproduction Die Liebe des Maharajah . Diessl played in a live Italian exile Maharaja , (shown by the Italian Diva into a pianist Isa Miranda ) love, because it resembles his late wife. The pianist is fascinated by the exotic stranger, but turns away from him when she realizes that he doesn't love her for her own sake. In the same year Diessl appeared in Paul Wegener's melodrama Moscow - Shanghai as the Russian captain who fell in love with a beautiful singer ( Pola Negri ) amid the turmoil of the revolution . As a Russian, he immediately appeared in Herbert Maisch's revolutionary melodrama Strong Hearts (1937) and in Richard Eichberg's two-part exotic film The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (1937/38). As a lover of the beautiful Maharani ( La Jana ), he makes himself the opponent of her jealous, powerful husband ( Frits van Dongen ). In the 1938 adventure film Kautschuk , Diessl slipped into the role of a wealthy Brazilian plantation owner who had to experience how a British adventurer not only robs his fiancée ( Vera von Langen ), but also breaks the Brazilian rubber monopoly through seed smuggling. He played a rich Brazilian again in 1940 in the crime film Stern von Rio . In 1941 he played the role of a Slovenian landowner alongside Olga Chekhova in Fritz Peter Buch's anti-Serb propaganda film People in the Storm . In 1941 Diessl played together with Fosco Giachetti and Isa Miranda in the film Die Weisse Göttin . Directed by Alfredo Guarini .

Gustav Diessl's grave

During the shooting of the film Strong Hearts , Gustav Diessl met the important opera singer Maria Cebotari , who divorced because of him and married him in 1938. After he had already shot a lot abroad, he worked almost exclusively in Italy from 1941 to 1944. It was not until 1944 that he was seen again in a German film: In Harald Braun's Ibsen adaptation Nora , he played the confidante and admirer of the heroine ( Luise Ullrich ). Diessl's last film role before the end of the Second World War was that of the Prussian lieutenant Ferdinand von Schill in Veit Harlan's persistence film Kolberg (1945).

After 1945 Diessl stood in front of the camera only once, namely as a prosecutor in GW Pabst's 1947 film The Trial , which deals with a ritual murder trial in 1882 and deals with anti-Semitism . After Diessl had already suffered two strokes, he died in March 1948 in his native Vienna. He is buried in the Döblinger Friedhof (group 28, row 1, no. 6). It was only after his death that two older films in which he played the male lead were released: the aforementioned film Strong Hearts , which was banned after its completion in 1937 because of its overly moderate anti-communism according to the judgment of the Film Inspectorate , and the crime film Ruf the conscience , which was turned off at the end of the war, but was only completed later by DEFA .

Gustav Diessl's first marriage was briefly married to Irmgard Amalie Wettach and then lived for several years with the actress Camilla Horn . From the second marriage with Maria Cebotari there are two sons who were adopted by the English pianist Clifford Curzon and his wife Lucille Wallace-Curzon after the death of Cebotari (she only survived Diessl by a little more than a year) .

Filmography

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 2: C - F. John Paddy Carstairs - Peter Fritz. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 388.
  • Hans-Michael Bock (Ed.): CineGraph. Lexicon for German-language films. Volume 1: A - D. Edition text + criticism, Munich 1984 ff. (Loose leaf edition).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Movie poster, The White Goddess. Retrieved June 15, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Richard Angst: The Demon of the Himalaya (Germany, Switzerland; dramatized documentary). Schweizer Film - Film Suisse: official organ of Switzerland., Accessed on June 7, 2020 .


personal data
SURNAME Diessl, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Diessl, Gustav Karl Balthasar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian film actor
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 1948
Place of death Vienna