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Lya De Putti (born Amalia Putti) was a Hungarian actress from the 1910s to the 1920s. She was born in Hungary in 1897, and at 16, she married Zoltan Szepessy and had two children with him. She started making German movies in 1918, and in 1922, she appeared in an F.W. Murnau movie, which made her a star. After her starring role in E.A. Dupont's "Variety" in 1925, Adolph Zukor hired her to come to the U.S. and work for Paramount, and she also starred in D.W. Griffith's "Sorrows of Satan" in 1927. The coming of sound ended her Hollywood career, and she attempted a comeback on Broadway, which also fizzled. In 1931, she swallowed a chicken bone and it was caught in her throat, and she was taken to a hospital, where it was removed, but complications resulted, and she died from pneumonia, and she was just 34 years old. She had divorced her husband Szepessy in 1918, and she had remarried Louis Jahnke in 1922, and she was still married to him when she died, but first husband Szepessy committed suicide right after her death.

Important Added Info: Note that this German Ross postcard has a wonderful history, different from any Ross postcards we have previously auctioned! A distributor in England purchased a large number of these and then had them overprinted with information about the movie on the back, and they then sent them to all the theater managers in England, to try to get them to book the movie after it had opened in London! See the back of this postcard, which shows the overprinting, and an English stamp and postmark, and an address to an English theater.

Note that in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, it became a common practice to pass out 3 1/2" x 5 1/2" "Ross postcards" to the people who attended a movie. These were postcards that people could send through the mail (each had a picture of one of the movie's stars on it, and standard postcard markings on the other side). But these were also sent to theaters where the stars would make personal appearances, and members of the audience would get the stars to autograph them if they could, but of course, the cards themselves did not come autographed! Sometimes the theaters would use a special "Das Programm Von Heute" that had a blank area on the cover, where they would cut four slits in the upper left and have the "Ross postcards" inserted into that area, so that the audience members would get the program and the card together! We imagine that theaters hoped that audience members would mail the postcards after they saw the movie to friends, telling them how much they enjoyed it, thus creating advertising for the movie. These are often called "Ross autograph cards" by collectors, because moviegoers sometimes obtained autographs on them. Ross postcards are quite collectible, signed or unsigned, but of course, they are worth far more signed. They are often quite rare, because most German paper of all kinds from before World War II was destroyed during the war, due to the massive paper shortages there at that time.

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