Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was a German film actor.
42 Facts About Conrad Veidt
2.
Conrad Veidt attracted early attention for his roles in the films Different from the Others, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and The Man Who Laughs.
3.
Conrad Veidt appeared in many British films, including The Thief of Bagdad, before emigrating to the United States around 1941, which led to his being cast in what may be his best remembered role as Major Strasser in Casablanca.
4.
Conrad Veidt was nicknamed "Connie", spelled "Conny", by his family and friends.
5.
Conrad Veidt's family was Lutheran, and Veidt was baptized on 26 March 1893.
6.
Conrad Veidt was later confirmed in a ceremony at the Protestant Evangelical Church in Alt-Schoneberg, Berlin on 5 March 1908.
7.
Two years after Karl's death, Conrad Veidt's father fell ill and required heart surgery.
8.
Conrad Veidt stood outside of the Deutsches Theater after every performance, waiting for the actors and hoping to be mistaken for one.
9.
Conrad Veidt took 10 lessons before auditioning for Max Reinhardt, reciting Goethe's Faust.
10.
Conrad Veidt offered Veidt a contract as an extra for one season's work, from September 1913 to August 1914 with a pay of 50 marks a month.
11.
Conrad Veidt contracted jaundice and pneumonia, and had to be evacuated to a hospital on the Baltic Sea.
12.
Conrad Veidt returned to Berlin where he was readmitted to the Deutsches Theater.
13.
From 1917 until his death, Conrad Veidt appeared in more than 100 films.
14.
Conrad Veidt's starring role in The Man Who Laughs, as a disfigured young outcast servant whose face is cut into a permanent grin, provided the inspiration for the iconic Batman villain the Joker.
15.
Conrad Veidt starred in other silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene, The Student of Prague and Waxworks, in which he played Ivan the Terrible.
16.
Conrad Veidt appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's film Anders als die Andern, one of the earliest films to sympathetically portray homosexuality, although the characters in it do not end up happily.
17.
Conrad Veidt had a leading role in Germany's first talking picture, Das Land ohne Frauen.
18.
Conrad Veidt moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s and made a few films there, but the advent of talking pictures and his difficulty with speaking English led him to return to Germany.
19.
Conrad Veidt opposed the Nazi regime and later contributed funds for the relief of Britons during the German Blitz bombings.
20.
When Conrad Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about his Rasse by writing Jude.
21.
Conrad Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was, and Conrad Veidt would neither renounce the woman he loved nor collaborate with the regime as many others did.
22.
Conrad Veidt was opposed to antisemitism and showed solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of 1933.
23.
Conrad Veidt had been informed that if he divorced and declared support for the new regime, he could continue to act in Germany.
24.
Conrad Veidt starred in a few films, such as George Cukor's A Woman's Face, where he received billing under Joan Crawford, and Nazi Agent, in which he had a dual role as both an aristocratic German Nazi spy and the man's twin brother, an anti-Nazi American.
25.
Conrad Veidt enjoyed sports, gardening, swimming, golfing, classical music, and reading fiction and nonfiction.
26.
On 10 June 1918, Conrad Veidt married Gussy Holl, a cabaret entertainer.
27.
Conrad Veidt was not present at her birth due to being in Italy working on The Fiddler of Florence, but took the first train to Berlin and wept as he met mother and child at the hospital; he was so hysterical from joy they had to sedate him and keep him in the hospital overnight.
28.
Conrad Veidt was named after one of Bergner's signature characters, Shakespeare's Viola.
29.
The birth of his daughter helped Conrad Veidt move on from the death of his mother, who had died of a heart condition in January 1922.
30.
From September 1926 to 1929 Conrad Veidt lived with his wife and daughter in a Spanish-style house in Beverly Hills.
31.
The family returned to Germany in 1929, and moved several times afterwards, including a temporary relocation to Vienna, Austria, while Conrad Veidt participated in a theatrical tour of the continent.
32.
Radke and Conrad Veidt divorced in 1932, with Radke saying the frequent relocations and the separations necessitated by Conrad Veidt's acting schedule frayed their marriage.
33.
Conrad Veidt said of Lilli in an October 1934 interview with The Sunday Dispatch,.
34.
The air raid shelter marshal wrote back to Conrad Veidt thanking him for the gifts.
35.
Conrad Veidt smuggled his parents-in-law from Austria to neutral Switzerland, and in 1935 he managed to get the Nazi government to let his ex-wife Radke and their daughter move to Switzerland.
36.
Conrad Veidt offered to help Felizitas' mother, Frau Radke, of whom he was fond, leave Germany.
37.
Conrad Veidt reportedly survived the war, but none of the Veidts ever saw her again.
38.
Conrad Veidt was not a political person, and was certainly not to be caught out on religious themes.
39.
Conrad Veidt was always honest, totally straight forward and kind.
40.
Conrad Veidt died of a heart attack on 3 April 1943 while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles with singer Arthur Fields and his personal physician.
41.
The Conrad Veidt Society was formed in 1990 to commemorate his 1993 centennial of birth and then to find a final home for the Veidt ashes, which Lily Veidt's nephew Ivan Rado had given to CVS founder James H Rathlesberger along with Veidt family papers and memorabilia.
42.
An earlier German-based Conrad Veidt Society had become inactive some years before the US-based society began.