Martin Kosleck

Martin Kosleck (born March 24, 1904 in Barkotzen, district of Alt Kolziglow , Pomerania; † January 15, 1994 in Santa Monica , California ) was a German-American film, television and stage actor. In 1931 he emigrated from Germany to Great Britain, from there to Hollywood in the USA . In the course of his career between 1927 and 1980 he was seen in 89 films and television programs, where he often embodied the type of "Nazi villain", in particular Joseph Goebbels .

Life

Martin Kosleck, born in Barkotzen in Pomerania (today Barkocin in Poland ), was the son of a Jewish-Russian forester. From an early age he was enthusiastic about acting. He attended Max Reinhardt's drama school for six years , where he mainly took on roles in Shakespeare plays. He also appeared in Berlin revues and musicals . At the age of 23 he got his first film role in the silent film Der Fahnträger von Sedan (director: Johannes Brandt ), 1929 in Napoleon on St. Helena (director: Lupu Pick ), in 1930 in his first sound film Alraune (director: Richard Oswald ) and in Naples - Die singende Stadt / City of Song (Germany / Great Britain; Director: Carmine Gallone ).

When the National Socialists came up, the Gestapo, at the instigation of the Propaganda Minister and President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, Joseph Goebbels, put the declared opponent of the Nazis on the list of “undesirable persons” and issued an arrest warrant against him. Kosleck had already moved to Great Britain in 1931, the following year he moved from there to the USA and went to Hollywood via New York. His first American film was the musical comedy Fashions of 1934 (starring Bette Davis ). Since he was initially hardly offered any further film roles, Kosleck initially returned to the New York stage. While working on Broadway in The Merchant of Venice , Anatole Litvak offered him a supporting role as Joseph Goebbels in the Warner Brothers production I Was a Nazi Spy . With the beginning of the Second World War and the entry of the USA into the war in 1941, anti-Nazi propaganda films boomed in the early 1940s and German Nazi actors hired against the Nazis were wanted. While many emigrants refused to play Nazis, Kosleck saw this as a professional opportunity and also an opportunity to get back on the Nazis, especially Goebbels. Because of his ice-cold charisma, his piercing gaze and his strong German accent, Kosleck was subsequently often engaged in the role of the "Nazi villain". In total, he portrayed Goebbels five times, and he also appeared as an SS man and a concentration camp officer, as well as a spy, secret agent, psychopath and others. To protect his relatives who remained in Germany, Kosleck claimed that his name was just a pseudonym and that he was born as "Nicolai Yoshkin".

After the end of the war, Nazi roles were no longer in demand and Kosleck had to get by with roles in B horror films for a while . Kosleck then returned to New York with his wife, the German-born actress Eleonora von Mendelssohn . He played a number of stage roles on Broadway in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including in The Madwoman of Chaillot ( The Madwoman of Chaillot ).

In the new medium of television, he took on guest appearances in various series episodes in the 1950s and 1960s (including The Rogues , 1964), sometimes again in the role of Nazi. After suffering a heart attack in the 1970s, it only appeared sporadically, mostly on television. His last film appearance was in 1980 in The Man with Bogart's Face .

Outside of acting, Kosleck also worked as a portrait painter in the Impressionist style when there was a lack of roles . Among others, Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich were portrayed by him.

From the early 1930s until his death in 1958, Kosleck had a sometimes turbulent relationship with the actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski , which is also detailed in the correspondence between Twardowski and his close friend Marlene Dietrich . In 1948 he married the actress unexpectedly Eleonora von Mendelssohn , the 1951 suicide committed. Kosleck died at the age of 89 after undergoing abdominal surgery in a convalescent home in Santa Monica , California.

Filmography

• 1927: The standard bearer of Sedan
• 1929: Napoleon on St. Helena
• 1930: mandrake
• 1930: The singing city
• 1934: Love without thread and thread (Fashions of 1934)
• 1939: I Was a Nazi Spy (Confessions of a Nazi Spy)
• 1939: Nurse Edith Cavell
• 1939: Espionage Agent
• 1939: Nick Carter, Master Detective
• 1940: Calling Philo Vance
• 1940: The Foreign Correspondent
• 1941: The Mad Doctor
• 1941: Underground
• 1941: International Lady
• 1941: The Devil Pays Off
• 1941: Agents of the Night ( All Through the Night )
• 1942: Fly-by-Night
• 1942: Nazi agent
• 1942: Berlin Correspondent
• 1942: Divide and Conquer
• 1942: Manila Calling
• 1943: Chetniks
• 1943: Bomber's Moon
• 1943: The North Star
• 1944: The Great Alaskan Mystery
• 1944: The Hitler Gang
• 1944: Secrets of Scotland Yard
• 1944: The Mummy's Curse
• 1945: Strange Holiday
• 1945: The Frozen Ghost
• 1945: Gangs of the Waterfront
• 1945: Dangerous Mission (Pursuit to Algiers)
• 1945: The Spider
• 1946: Crime of the Century
• 1946: Just Before Dawn
• 1946: House of Horrors
• 1946: The Countess of Monte Christo ( The Wife of Monte Cristo )
• 1946: She-Wolf of London
• 1947: The Beginning or the End
• 1948: Half Past Midnight
• 1948: Assigned to Danger
• 1948: Smugglers' Cove
• 1956: Spy for Germany
• 1961: Wild buds (Something Wild)
• 1962: Hitler
• 1964: The Flesh Eaters
• 1964: 36 hours (36 hours)
• 1965: Password: Morituri (Morituri)
• 1966: On behalf of HARM (Agent from HARM)
• 1969: Wake Me When the War Is Over (TV movie)
• 1970: Where, please, are you going to the front? (Which Way to the Front?)
• 1971: Longstreet (TV movie)
• 1980: Sam Marlow, private detective (The Man with Bogart's Face)

Web links

• Martin Kosleck in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Martin Kosleck at filmportal.de
• Photo by Martin Kosleck

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Blubacher: Paradise in difficult times. Artists and thinkers in exile in the Pacific Palisades area . Munich 2011, pp. 112–114.
2. ↑ Marlene's best friend: Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (May 5, 1898 to November 19, 1958) - Search for traces on the 60th anniversary of death - SMU. Retrieved September 18, 2019 (German).