Lya de Putti

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Lya de Putti, photograph (around 1928) by Alexander Binder

Lya de Putti (born January 10, 1897 in Vécse , then Hungary ; † November 27, 1931 in New York , NY , USA ) was a Hungarian dancer and actress who was particularly successful in Germany .

Life

Lya de Putti was the youngest daughter of a Hungarian Uhlan officer of Italian descent. She grew up on her parents' country estate near Kolozsvár (now Cluj, Romania). There she was also taught by private tutors; later she came to a nearby convent school. At the age of 16, Putti married District Administrator Zoltán Szepessy. With him she had two daughters: Lucy (* 1914) and Judith (* 1916). Shortly after the birth of the second daughter, she left her family and went to Budapest . Caught in the traditions of the conservative rural aristocracy, the abandoned husband staged a funeral for his wife. They later secretly divorced and Putti never saw her family again. A few weeks after Putti's death in 1931, Szepessy committed suicide.

In Budapest, Putti worked as a nurse for some time and attended Szidi Rákosi's drama school . While she was still attending this school, Putti appeared in revues by the Royal Orpheum and Magyar Szinház in Budapest , but without any real success. During this time she engaged Ferenc Molnár for his play The Fairy Tale of the Wolf . Through Molnár, Putti got in touch with the Phönix and Astra film studios and also received small and very small extras. Among other things, Béla Balogh hired her for his The Soldiers of the Emperor , an adaptation of a play by Imre Földes . Putti slowly became known and was able to assert himself alongside established colleagues such as Fern Andra .

Lya de Putti, photograph (around 1928) by Alexander Binder

Since Putti no longer believed in her artistic breakthrough in Budapest, she went to Bucharest and was entrusted there in 1920 by Dolly A. Sigetti with the leading role in the film Auf den Wogen des Glücks . Immediately after this shooting, Putti was hired to Berlin that same year , where she shone in the gypsy blood of Karl Otto Krause . After a few smaller roles with director Richard Oswald , the breakthrough came with the box office magnet The Indian Tomb of Joe May . She then appeared in two films by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau . She received good reviews in the international press for her role as Gerda in The Burning Acker . In 1924 Lya de Putti reached the peak of her popularity: well before Lil Dagover and Asta Nielsen , she was voted the most popular actress by the readers of the “Neue Illustrierte Filmwoche”.

No sooner had the film Young Blood by Manfred Noa turned off, the longed commitment came to Hollywood . Adolph Zukor hired her for various projects, as Putti was already known there from Ewald André Dupont's variety show . The subsequent costume film Manon Lescaut , in which she took on the title role, was also a great success. In 1926 she received a contract with Paramount . But the first film, The Sorrows of Satan , directed by David Wark Griffith , turned into an artistic and financial disaster. Whereupon she made a failed suicide attempt.

Even her temporary return to Berlin, where she played the lead role in Adolf Edgar Licho's film Charlott in 1927/28 , could not change this situation. Due to her difficult professional and personal situation, the actress increasingly suffered from depression. In December 1925 she fell out of the window of her apartment in the Bavarian Quarter, but fell on soft snow and was therefore released from the hospital after a few days. However, the press interpreted this as a suicide attempt and de Putti left this country for good, disappointed in Germany.

This was followed by appearances in rather inferior films that received little response from audiences and critics. In 1929 Putti went to London to shoot the film The Informer (English title: The night after betrayal ) under Arthur Robison . Initially started as a silent film, attempts were made to take account of the emerging sound film by providing parts of the film with dialogues. Putti had to be dubbed because of her strong accent. But the film did not go down well with the audience. Shortly thereafter, she declared her final withdrawal from the canvas.

Her subsequent attempts to succeed on stage again failed. The comedy Made in France , which premiered in New York on November 17, 1930, was canceled after just a few days. Lya de Putti's life ended tragically. She swallowed a chicken bone that had to be removed by emergency surgery. Complications resulted in blood poisoning , which, already weakened by pneumonia, did not survive. She died on November 27th at the age of 34.

Filmography

literature

Web links

Commons : Lya De Putti  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lya de Putti's The Sorrows of Satan. Illustrated Film Week, accessed on May 10, 2020 .
  2. ↑ 1926, unsuccessful suicide attempt by Lya de Puttis. Retrieved June 4, 2020 .
  3. ↑ F.-B. Habel: Crazy with desire. The Fildives from the silent movie era. A passionate look back to the time of the first stars. 1999, p. 96.
personal data
SURNAME Putti, Lya de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Putti, Amalia de (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian dancer and actress
DATE OF BIRTH January 10, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Vécse , Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1931
Place of death New York , NY , USA