Lotte Palfi-Andor

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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.

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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