Conrad Veidt Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life and Training
Conrad Veidt was born in Berlin in 1893 and came of age in a city that was both the capital of an empire and a crucible for modern art. After school he gravitated to the stage, joining the circle around the influential director Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater. Reinhardt prized expressive movement, precise gesture, and the interplay of light and shadow onstage, and Veidt absorbed those lessons quickly. His tall, spare frame and keen, angular features lent themselves to stylized performance, and he learned how to project character through controlled physicality as much as through voice. Brief military service during World War I interrupted his early career, but he returned to Berlin determined to act, moving from the theater into the rapidly expanding German film industry.

Breakthrough in German Silent Cinema
Veidt became a defining face of German Expressionist cinema. He is inseparable from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene, in which he played Cesare, the somnambulist whose haunted eyes and spectral glide made the role a visual emblem of the era. Acting opposite Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover, Veidt used stillness and precision to create a figure who felt both ethereal and dangerous. He renewed his collaboration with Wiene in The Hands of Orlac (1924), this time as a concert pianist psychologically shattered after a hand transplant, and his performance ranged from brooding restraint to tortured panic.

Veidt took on a range of roles in the 1920s, expanding far beyond expressionist horror. In Richard Oswalds Different from the Others (1919), made with the participation of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, he played a musician destroyed by blackmail under Germanys anti-homosexuality law. The film was one of cinemas earliest arguments for tolerance and remains a key work in queer film history. He added regal menace as Ivan the Terrible in Waxworks (1924) and achieved a tragic, romantic intensity as Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs (1928), directed by Paul Leni. In that last film, the carved smile masking a wounded soul showed Veidts ability to suggest complex emotion while working under heavy makeup, a technique that would influence later screen iconography.

Exile and Work in Britain
The Nazis rise to power in 1933 ended Veidts German career. He was openly hostile to the regimes ideology, and his marriage to Ilona Prager, who was Jewish, placed both in danger. They left Germany, and Veidt resumed his career in Britain, learning to act in English with the same precision he had brought to silent roles. He joined a community of exiles and British filmmakers determined to tell stories about the new Europe. He worked closely with producer Alexander Korda and with director Michael Powell, starring in The Spy in Black (1939) with Valerie Hobson and in Contraband (1940). These wartime thrillers took advantage of Veidts capacity for ambiguity, letting him play men who could be seductive, intelligent, and morally conflicted. He became a British citizen in 1939, a choice that underscored both gratitude and conviction.

Transition to Hollywood
The outbreak of war moved film productions across borders. The Thief of Bagdad (1940), produced by Korda, began in Britain and continued in the United States; Veidt, cast as the grand vizier Jaffar, crafted one of the screens great villains, sleek and hypnotic rather than bombastic. In Hollywood he quickly became a specialist in roles that involved power and menace. Directors valued his ability to suggest danger without raising his voice or lifting a hand. He often accepted parts as Nazi officers or agents, but he was known for insisting that such characters be depicted as villainous, with their cruelty and delusions exposed rather than glamorized.

He worked with a roster of major filmmakers and stars in those years. In Escape (1940) he played a ruthless official opposite Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor. In A Womans Face (1941) he acted with Joan Crawford, bringing icy poise to a story of moral transformation. In Nazi Agent (1942), directed by Jules Dassin, he tackled a dual role, playing both an immigrant and his sinister look-alike, a showcase for his technical control and precise differentiation of character. And in Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, Veidt made Major Strasser an unforgettable antagonist: cultured, smug, and implacable. Sharing the screen with Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, he set the standard for the polished villain whose authority erodes when confronted by courage and decency.

Personal Life and Principles
Veidts private life intersected with his politics. He had married more than once, and he was devoted to his daughter from an earlier marriage, even as the storms of exile complicated family life. With Ilona Prager he found a partner in flight as well as in conviction; the couple navigated the dislocations of moving from Berlin to London and then to Los Angeles. Friends and collaborators often remarked on his courtesy and seriousness. Although he could be severe onscreen, offscreen he gave time and resources to relief efforts during the war and used his fame to argue against Nazi ideology. The discipline he learned under Max Reinhardt never left him: Veidt arrived on set prepared, choreographed his movements carefully, and treated makeup, costume, and lighting as integral parts of performance rather than mere adornment.

Death and Legacy
Veidt died suddenly of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1943, at the age of 50, while still in demand and at the height of his Hollywood visibility. He left behind Ilona and the professional family he had gathered across three film cultures: the directors who shaped him in Germany, the producers and colleagues who welcomed him in Britain, and the stars and craftspeople who recognized his artistry in the United States.

His legacy is unusually rich for an actor whose career lasted barely a quarter-century. Through Caligari, Orlac, and The Man Who Laughs he helped define how cinema could render the inner life visible; through wartime thrillers and anti-Nazi dramas he showed how a performer in exile could turn typecasting into testimony. The elegant menace of Jaffar and the chilling certainty of Major Strasser continue to live in popular memory, while his early collaboration with figures like Magnus Hirschfeld stands as a reminder that film can be a tool for social argument as well as entertainment. Generations later, the sharp silhouette, haunted eyes, and deliberate grace of Conrad Veidt still teach how much can be said without a word.

Our collection contains 23 quotes who is written by Conrad, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Mother - Art - Legacy & Remembrance - Movie.