FRANCIS LEDERER

Francis Lederer was an Austro-Hungarian (in what is now the Czech Republic) actor from the 1920s to the 1970s. Born in 1899, he served in World War I, and then became a stage actor in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Germany.

His first movie was in 1928, and in 1929 he got a big break with an important role in G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks. His career really took off when sound movies began (the movies preferred stage actors when they made the transition from silent to sound, and Lederer had a decade of stage experience).

In 1931 he appeared in London in the stage play Volpone, and the show traveled to Broadway and then to Hollywood over the next two years, and Lederer decided to stay in Los Angeles, due to the worsening situation in his homeland.

He played leading roles in 1934 and 1935, and he was a favorite of Irving Thalberg, who announced that he would make Lederer "the biggest star in Hollywood" but the death of Thalberg in 1935 ended that, and Lederer was soon playing secondary roles, and he spent the rest of the 1930s and the 1940s alternating between movies and the stage, and then in the 1950s he added in much television work.

He became an acting teacher, but because he had wisely invested in real estate in the Los Angeles area, he had became extremely wealthy, but he never quit teaching acting and he was still teaching the week before he passed away in 2000, at the age of 100!

Some of his movies include: Die Buchse Der Pandora, Midnight, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, The Diary of a Chambermaid, The Return of Dracula, and The Ambassador's Daughter