Lotte Palfi-Andor
Lotte Palfi-Andor , née Lotte Mosbacher (born July 28, 1903 in Bochum , † July 8, 1991 in New York City ) was a German actress and author .
life and career
Lotte Mosbacher, who comes from a middle-class Jewish family, worked as an aspiring stage actress in Darmstadt , among other places . After the seizure of power of the Nazis , she fled in 1934 with her first husband, the film editor Viktor Palfi , through France and Spain to the United States . Lotte's father Felix had died in 1930, her mother Betty, née Katzenstein, died in 1942 in the Litzmannstadt ghetto .
In the United States, Lotte and Viktor Palfi initially found no work in their actual occupation and at times had to stay afloat as cooks or servants . The couple separated. Under the stage name "Jean Brooks", the actress made her Hollywood debut in 1939 in a small role in Anatole Litvak's anti-Nazi film I Was a Nazi Spy . During the filming, she met the actor Wolfgang Zilzer , who was also of German-Jewish origin and performed under the stage name "Paul Andor". In 1942 the two had small roles in Michael Curtiz 's legendary melodrama Casablanca . Lotte Palfi and Wolfgang Zilzer were not mentioned in the credits as the “woman who has to sell her diamonds” and as the “man with the expired papers” , but their names are still known to many fans of this cult film today .
Lotte Palfi and Wolfgang Zilzer married in 1943. When Hollywood's need for German character actors declined at the end of the war, the couple found work on the stage .
In 1976 John Schlesinger hired Lotte Palfi-Andor, who had not worked for the film since 1952, for a small but impressive role in his thriller The Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman . As a victim of the Holocaust , she recognizes her tormentor, the concentration camp doctor Szell ( Laurence Olivier ), and chases him screaming through 47th Street in New York City. The actress, who had to sell her diamonds in Casablanca on the run from the Nazis, tried more than thirty years later to help prevent a Nazi from bringing the diamonds stolen from Jews to safety.
Lotte Palfi-Andor made other film appearances, for example in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz in 1979 and in the Dudley-Moore comedy Lovesick in 1983 .
Mid-1980s, she published her memoirs under the title "Memoirs of an unknown actress," was published in an anthology under the title "The strange year" (in the United States Years of Estrangement ) and went with it at a reading in Berlin on .
Shortly before they both died in 1991, their marriage to Wolfgang Zilzer was divorced. The native American, who had Parkinson's disease, wanted to die in Germany, where he had spent his youth. This return was out of the question for Lotte Palfi-Andor.
Movies
- 1939: I Was a Nazi Spy ( Confessions of a Nazi Spy )
- 1941: Out of Darkness
- 1941: Underground
- 1941: Blossoms in the Dust ( Blossoms in the Dust )
- 1942: Casablanca
- 1942: Reunion in France
- 1943 Hazardous honeymoon ( Above Suspicion )
- 1943: The Leopard Man
- 1944 The Mask of Dimitrios ( The Mask of Dimitrios )
- 1944: The Seventh Cross ( The Seventh Cross )
- 1945: Stairway to Light (short film)
- 1976: Marathon Man ( Marathon Man )
- 1979: Behind the Spotlight ( All That Jazz )
- 1983: Lovesick - The lovesick psychiatrist ( Lovesick )
- 1986: Katzenjammer Kids
Fonts
- In all innocence. Children's sayings. Heimeran Verlag, Munich 1962, DNB 453464289 .
- Years of Estrangement. Northwestern University Press , Evanston , Illinois 1996, ISBN 0-8101-1181-0 . (Contains two autobiographies. Erich Leyens : Under the Nazi Regime: Experiences and Observations 1933–1938 . Lotte Andor: Memoirs of an Unknown Actress or, I Never Was a Genuine St Bernard. )
- with Erich Leyens: The Strange Years. Memories of Germany. Life pictures. Jewish memories and testimonies 1. Fischer, 1991, ISBN 3-596-10779-2 .
Web links
- Lotte Palfi Andor in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Lotte Palfi-Andor at filmportal.de
- Biographies of the Casablanca supporting actors ( Memento from March 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
- Literature by and about Lotte Palfi-Andor in the catalog of the German National Library
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Palfi-Andor, Lotte |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lotte Mosbacher (birth name); Jean Brooks (stage name) |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German actress and author |
DATE OF BIRTH | July 28, 1903 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Bochum , German Empire |
DATE OF DEATH | July 8, 1991 |
Place of death | New York City , New York , United States |