Conrad Veidt
Conrad Veidt
Hans Walter Conrad Veidtwas a German actor best remembered for his roles in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, and, after being forced to migrate to Britain by the rise of Nazism in Germany, his English-speaking roles in The Thief of Bagdad, and, in Hollywood, Casablanca. After a successful career in German silent film, where he was one of the best-paid stars of Ufa, he left Germany in 1933 with his new Jewish wife...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth22 January 1893
CityBerlin, Germany
CountryGermany
I am indifferent if my spinach is leaf or creamed; if I work to fatiguing point or spend days doing nothing; if I smoke fifty cigarettes a day or none at all; if it rains or shines; if the dentist hurts, or the shoe pinches, or I secure a bargain.
The right partner in a film is equal to half the audience!
When I was in a play in a theater, and all was going well on stage, I felt that the audience and I were somehow joined into one.
It was like a physical impact, something vital and quick, happening to us both. And I knew, from that moment, that whatever happened between us, we might disagree, get on each other's nerves, quarrel, do each other harm, but we could never be indifferent.
What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.
It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played.
I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them.
I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.
My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing.
I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul.
Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.
My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.
I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.
So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just beginning.