Paul Kohner was an Austrian-American talent agent and producer who managed the careers of Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Huston, Liv Ullmann and Billy Wilder, as well as actors who came from Europe before World War II.
16 Facts About Paul Kohner
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Paul Kohner's father was Julius "Kino" Kohner, who managed the local movie theater and published a film industry newspaper, and his mother was Helene Kohner.
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Paul Kohner had two brothers, Friedrich "Frederick" Kohner, a film and TV writer who created the character Gidget, and Walter Kohner, a Hollywood agent whose wife, Hanna Kohner, in May 1953, was the first non-celebrity featured on the television show, This Is Your Life, where she was the first Holocaust survivor to talk about her experiences in concentration and death camps on television.
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Paul Kohner met Carl Laemmle during an interview in Karlovy Vary in 1920.
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Laemmle was impressed by 18-year old Paul Kohner and offered him a job.
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Paul Kohner started out as an office errand boy at Laemmle's company, Universal Pictures, in New York.
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Paul Kohner moved to Hollywood and worked his way up the studio system, working in positions at Universal like unit production supervisor as well as casting director.
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Paul Kohner moved back to the United States in the early 1930s.
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Paul Kohner worked as a producer, responsible for shepherding many Universal Pictures films like the Lon Chaney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, William Wyler's A House Divided that starred Walter Huston, among others.
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Paul Kohner produced many alternate language versions of films that were often shot simultaneously with their English-language counterparts, sometimes shooting at night on the same sets, but with Spanish casts of actors and different costumes.
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Paul Kohner's office was on the Sunset Strip in a building owned by a partner of his, Stanley Bergerman, who was Carl Laemmle's son-in-law.
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In 1938, Paul Kohner co-founded the European Film Fund with Ernst Lubitsch, and Universal Pictures studio head, Carl Laemmle.
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From 1923 to 1927, Paul Kohner was in a relationship with Mary Philbin.
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When Paul Kohner died, he still had love letters Philbin had written to him in his possession.
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In 1988, Paul Kohner died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, California.
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Paul Kohner's wife, the Mexican-born film actress Lupita Tovar, died at age 106 on November 12,2016.