Gustav Fröhlich

Gustav Fröhlich (1902 to 1987) was a German actor and film director, born in Hanover as an illegitimate child and raised by foster parents. Before acting he worked as a provincial newspaper editor and a writer of popular novels. He began on the stage in the early 1920s, appeared under Max Reinhardt at the Deutsche Theater and played Franz Liszt in the 1922 film Paganini. His breakthrough was the role of Freder Fredersen in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927); the film lost money but made him a leading film star in Germany, and he was also noted for Asphalt (1929). In 1930 he was called to Hollywood for German-language versions of American films. He directed Rakoczy-Marsch (1933), in which he also played the lead, and went on to direct seven more films and write the screenplays of five, and he stayed one of the foremost male stars of German cinema through the Third Reich and into the 1950s. After the war he moved from leading men to supporting parts, including Die Sünderin (1951). He received the German Film Award for lifetime achievement in 1973 and died in Switzerland in 1987.