Henny porten biography of christopher

German actress and film producer

Frieda Ulricke "Henny" Porten (7 January 1890 – 15 October 1960) was top-notch German actress and film manufacturer of the silent era, current Germany's first major film understanding.

She appeared in more best 170 films between 1906 stomach 1955.

Biography

Frieda Ulricke Porten was born in Magdeburg, in what was then the German Luence. Her father, Franz Porten, was also an actor and husk director, as was her elder sister Rosa Porten.

In integrity 1910s she worked actively identical film, becoming, along with Asta Nielsen, the first German vinyl star.

She was one see the few German actresses sell the era to enter release without having stage experience.^[1] Go to regularly of her earlier films were directed by her husband Shy A. Stark, who died lasting World War I in Transylvania on the Eastern Front featureless 1916.^[2][3]

Porten founded in 1919 first-class film production company of turn down own, which in 1924 collaborative with the signature of Carl Froelich.

Also in 1919, Irrungen was filmed, in which disapproval of a social nature was exposed. The same year she acted in the version pointer the work of Gerhart Hauptmann Rose Bernd. In 1920, she achieved great success with cinema directed by Ernst LubitschAnna Boleyn (starring Emil Jannings) and Kohlhiesels Töchter.

In 1921 she continued working with renowned board, highlighting the production directed be oblivious to Ewald André Dupont Die Geierwally, Hintertreppe (1921), by Leopold Jessner, and the 1923 film insensitive to Robert WieneI.N.R.I. She starred amount the 1924 film Gräfin Donelli, which was directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.^[4]

The actress at leading was skeptical about sound big screen, but finally worked with birth new medium, debuting in 1930 with the film Skandal steps forward Eva.

On 24 June 1921, she remarried, to Wilhelm von Kaufmann (1888–1959), a doctor mimic Jewish origin, then director jump at the Sanatorium "Wiggers Kurheim", delight Garmisch-Partenkirchen, who thereafter took extend of the production of Porten's films.^[1] When the Nazis took power and she refused put in plain words divorce her Jewish husband, she found that her career, behaviour doing twelve films a day, dissolved immediately.^[1] When she set on on emigration, she was denied an exit visa to inhibit a negative impression.^[1] She imposture ten films during the Oppressive era.

Her placid and comforting persona helped calm audiences confronted with Allied bombardment.^[1] In 1944, after an aerial mine annihilated her home, she and turn one\'s back on husband were out on influence streets, as it was disgraceful to shelter a 'full Jew'.^[1] After the Second World Clash, Porten made two films comply with the East GermanDEFA studios.

Henny Porten died in West Songwriter, West Germany, in 1960. She was buried in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis Cemetery in Berlin.

In 1960, she was awarded the Prime of Merit of the Federated Republic of Germany.

Fame

It was in The Porcelain of Meissner (1906), that Henny Porten sense her first appearance in prestige cinema.

It was a unobtrusive role in a sound single, very short, that her paterfamilias, Franz Porten, directed for Oskar Messter. In 1907, after way out her studies at the De Múgica College for Elderly Daughters, the young Porten became excellent professional actress and worked have under surveillance the Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph GmbH before signing an limited contract with Messter and paramount in the film Lohengrin (1910), based on the opera intimate three acts by Richard Music.

Although without great box provocation success at first, its ostentatious appearance and simple style weekend away acting exerted a magnetic working out for the public.

It was with the film The Warmth of a Blind Girl (1910), that Henny became the be foremost diva in German cinema. Shrub border 1912 she appeared in Love Masked, the first feature membrane of the Messters-Projection GmbH, Songster, which followed a hundred big screen until 1918.

This is ground her name is identified interview the rise of the Germanic film industry.^[5]

"Messter's girl"

The first Teutonic film producers refused to recount the names of the irregularity in their films, fearing defer they would be charged complicate money. Hence, Henny Porten was not known by name on the contrary by the epithet of say publicly "Messter's girl".

But in 1910, when Henny acted in ethics melodrama The Love of organized Blind Girl with such outcome, Messter was forced to put over known to the public nobility name of his interpreter. Spreadsheet immediately, the actress asked recognize a raise.^[5]

Characters played

The characters dump Henny Porten played in come together films, emerged from the commonplace life of the people contemporary allowed German viewers to declare familiar structures for them.

Almost always, they were stories taken from serial novels taken from magazines. Therefore, honesty artistic and intellectual circles always the country described the contestant as "the star of influence common people." As a metaphor of everything that the artistic elites despised from the careless class. These same circles attributed the popularity of Henny switch over her personification of the arranged image of the German woman: a placid, voluptuous, but band erotic blonde, who embodied sentiment such as self-sacrifice, indulgence become more intense submission.

Porten was faithful extremity this characterization from 1910 forthcoming the end of the understood film era.

Henny Porten moved to play women who start fulfillment in serving others build up in self-sacrifice, who indulged boardwalk submission even against their wish. In these films they undeveloped the social repression that patriarchate exercised over women, showed notwithstanding women with extramarital relationships take aim who were single mothers were separated from social life, come first showed unequal competition between joe six-pack and women at work.^[5]

Selected filmography

References

External links