Conrad Veidt
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The ThumbScore for Conrad Veidt (88.5%) is the average audience approval rating across 2 films. Each movie's ThumbScore represents the percentage of real audiences who rated it positively. A higher score means more of Conrad's films are well-received by everyday viewers.
Hans Walter Conrad Veidt ( FYTE, German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈfaɪt]; 22 January 1893 – 3 April 1943) was a German and British actor. He attracted early attention for his roles in the films Different from the Others (1919), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and The Man Who Laughs (1928).
After a successful career in German silent films, where he was one of the best-paid stars of UFA, Veidt and his new Jewish wife Ilona Prager left Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. The couple settled in Britain, where he took citizenship in 1939. Veidt subsequently appeared in many British films, including The Thief of Bagdad (1940). After emigrating to the United States around 1941, he was cast as Major Strasser in Casablanca (1942), his last film role to be released during his lifetime.
Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was born on 22 January 1893 in his parents' home at Tieckstraße 39 in Berlin to Amalie Marie (née Gohtz) and Philipp Heinrich Veidt, a former military man turned civil servant. Veidt would later recall, "Like many fathers, he was affectionately autocratic in his home life, strict, idealistic. He was almost fanatically conservative." By contrast, Amalie was sensitive and nurturing. Veidt was nicknamed "Connie", also spelled "Conny", by his family and friends.
His family was Lutheran, and Veidt was baptized on 26 March 1893. He was later confirmed in a ceremony at the Protestant Evangelical Church in Alt-Schöneberg, Berlin, on 5 March 1908. Veidt's only sibling, an older brother named Karl, died in 1900 of scarlet fever at the age of 9. The family spent their summers in Potsdam. Two years after Karl's death, Veidt's father fell ill and required heart surgery.
From 1917 until his death, Veidt appeared in more than 100 films. One of his earliest performances was as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a classic of German Expressionist cinema, with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover. His starring role in The Man Who Laughs (1928), as a disfigured young outcast servant whose face is cut into a permanent grin, provided the (visual) inspiration for the iconic Batman villain the Joker.
Veidt starred in other silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac (1924), also directed by Robert Wiene, The Student of Prague (1926) and Waxworks (1924), in which he played Ivan the Terrible. Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), one of the earliest films to sympathetically portray homosexuality, although the characters in it do not end up happily. He had a leading role in Germany's first talking picture, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, 1929). He moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s and made a few films there, but the advent of talking pictures and his difficulty with speaking English led him to return to Germany.
Born 1893-01-22 in Berlin, Germany. Died 1943-04-03.
On ThumbScore, Conrad Veidt appears in 2 films with an average audience score of 88.5%, most frequently in the Drama genre.
