Who was the first horror film star?  No, it wasn't Bela Lugosi.  In fact, the first horror film star was in the running for Lugosi's role as Dracula.  But he was more than a horror star and his performances grace many now classic films.  But we'll stick to out last, as it were, and take a look at the record of...

By JOE WINTERS

Before there were horror stars, before horror even became a movie classification, there was Conrad Veidt. And he wasn’t just a horror film star.

Veidt played diverse character and historical roles in a variety of film genres. He tackled roles in movies that addressed social issues in such titles as Sinning Mother (1918) and Prostitution (1919). Other issues ranged from gay rights in 1919’s Different From The Others to the plight of Jews in Jew Suess (1934). But this being HORROR-WOOD, we’ll take a look at Veidt’s roles that go beyond the realm of reality.

Born January 22, 1893 as Hans Walter Conrad Weidt in Potsdam, Germany, Veidt started on stage in 1913 as a protégé of renowned impresario Max Reinhardt. In 1916 Veidt made the jump to motion pictures just as German Expressionism began to make its influential mark in cinema. Among his early work was Furcht, a.k.a. Fear (1917), with Veidt as an Indian priest who haunts a man to death for stealing a sacred figurine.

Conrad’s next excursion into the un-worldly was Unheimliche Geschicten, a.k.a. Weird Tales, an anthology of five tales casting the versatile Veidt in each under the direction of Richard Oswald, father of frequent Outer Limits episode director Gerd Oswald. Veidt, also appearing as one of three spirits who leap out of their portraits, helped introduce each tale.

In the first, he searches for a mysteriously vanished woman. This story is similar in ways to one filmed years later in director Terence Fisher’s excellent So Long At The Fair (1950). In the second weird tale, a man is haunted by the spirit of a murdered rival (Veidt). The third vignette, based on Poe’s "The Black Cat," offers a jealous husband (Reinhold Schunzel) who kills his wife and walls up the body.

Veidt plays the woman’s lover who uncovers the tragedy. The fourth segment is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s "The Suicide Club." Here the club is run by the shady Veidt. The final story takes a humorous turn with Veidt as a Baron who teaches a lesson to a braggart with designs on the Baroness.

When Fear director Robert Weine made The Cabinet Of Dr, Caligari (1920), he cast Veidt as Cesare, the somnambulistic servant at the murderous command of the title character played by Werner Krauss. The expressionist set design and Veidt’s own ability via body language to become one with that design resulted in the first great psychological horror film.

A young man recounts the tale of carnival mesmerist Caligari who unleashed sleepwalking killer Cesare on a small town. Following some mysterious murders it is revealed that all this is merely the imagination of the emotionally disturbed narrator and that Caligari is in fact the head of the asylum treating the young man. The opening and closing sequences were not in the original script which screenwriters Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz intended as an indictment on authority.

For Janowitz, Caligari symbolized the autocratic government the writer hated, a hierarchy that compelled citizens to kill or be killed. Director Weine added the framing device to provide the opposite effect…a kinder, gentler authority. The bottom line in the finished film is that no one escapes authority.

In order for the story to work, Weine wanted the entire film to look crazy. The strange, twisted set designs are considered by many to be the star of the show, but it was the director who integrated his actors into the sets to create the sensation the film would become on both sides of the Atlantic. In America the New York critics raved positive, while those in Los Angeles feared a German cinematic invasion and encouraged people against it.

That same year saw the release of Der Januakopf, a.k.a. The Two-Faced Man, a telling of the Jekyll/Hyde tale with Veidt in the dual role of Dr. Warren and Mr. O’Connor. Also in the cast was a young Bela Lugosi as Dr. Warren’s butler. Sadly, the film is now considered lost.

In the mystical, romantic adventure epic The Indian Tomb (1921), Veidt dominates as a merciless Maharajah. The perils are many, from leprosy to man-eating tigers. The film was directed by Joe May, whose later credits included The Invisible Man Returns (1940). The screenplay was by a young Fritz Lang and his soon-to-be-wife Thea von Harbou.

Director Paul Leni’s anthology Waxworks (1924) starred Veidt in the second of three tales as an insane Ivan the Terrible who delights in torture and killing until his fateful hourglass marks him for death.

Veidt re-teamed with Caligari director Robert Weine for The Hands Of Orlac as the concert pianist whose hands are crushed in an accident and replaced with those of a murderer.

Official remakes include the more easily available Mad Love (1936) and The Hands Of Orlac (1961). The Student Of Prague (1926) cemented Veidt’s status as an international star. In it Veidt plays Balduin, a poor-but-well-meaning student and expert swordsman who makes a deal with a devilish sort played by Caligari co-star Werner Krauss and winds up haunted by a mirror image and driven to a tragic end.

American film idol John Barrymore persuaded Veidt to come to the States to appear as King Louis XI in The Beloved Rogue (1927). Universal Pictures, meanwhile, was looking for someone to fill the void after Lon Chaney went to MGM. Conrad Veidt, having proven to be Germany’s man of a thousand faces, stepped into the role of Gwynplaine in Universal’s grand melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928 and based on Victor Hugo’s novel) for Waxworks director Paul Leni.

As a man with a hideous grin carved into his sometimes half-covered face, Veidt again relied on his expressive eyes to convey emotion. The result was another triumph for the actor. Veidt’s final silent film and final film for Universal was The Last Performance, a tale of a romantically spurned magician (Veidt) turned cruel. For the Hungarian print, Veidt’s lines were dubbed by Bela Lugosi.

Speaking of Bela, his signature film role of a certain Transylvanian Count might well have gone to Veidt, but Conrad passed on the part due to his German accent getting in the way. Luckily, Lugosi’s own accent proved an asset in this case. As for Conrad Veidt, the advent of talkies prompted a return to Germany where his flexible voice and compelling presence were put to good use in a number of roles, including that mad monk Rasputin.

The rise of Hitler prompted departure from the homeland for Veidt and his second wife in 1933. In England, the actor again distinguished himself in roles ranging from villains to romantic leads. In the science fictionish F.P.1, Veidt played the heroic pilot Major Ellissen, foiling a group of evil industrialists plotting to sabotage a re-fueling platform.

Veidt’s role was played by Hans Albers and by Charles Boyer in simultaneously shot versions for Germany and France by the same director, Karl Hartl.

In The Passing Of The Third Floor Back (1935) Veidt was a kindly yet enigmatic stranger (an angel perhaps?) who entered and enriched the lives of a group of tenement dwellers.

Conrad Veidt’s final fantasy role was that of the villainous vizier Jaffar in producer/director Alexander Korda’s The Thief Of Baghdad (1940). It was the actor’s only color film, and as so many who’ve seen the film will attest, a beauty.

Donning a turban one more time, Veidt brought to the role the air of mystery, charm and villainy so essential to the part as he summoned wind storms, delighted the doddering Sultan (also the film’s screenwriter Miles Malleson) with a mechanical flying horse and later assassinated the old man with a seductive six-armed statue. These creations were but part of the superb production design of this magical adventure classic.

With the World at war, the film industry did its part with a non-stop barrage of patriotic product. Naturally there was a need for the right actors to depict those naughty Nazis. And so, Conrad Veidt had no trouble finding employment as German officers making life miserable for everyone from Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor (in 1940’s Escape) to Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains (in 1943’s Casablanca), and Valerie Hobson in U-Boat 29 in 1939 and Blackout in 1940. Veidt’s final film was Above Suspicion with Joan Crawford in 1943.

On April 3, 1943, while playing golf in Los Angeles, Conrad Veidt suffered a massive heart attack and died at age 50.

In his life, Conrad Veidt portrayed a gallery of characters, from the historical to the hysterical. His was an extraordinary career that encompassed well over one hundred films, many of which were of a fantastic nature. For these, Conrad Veidt could well be considered one of the first great horror stars.

Thanks, Joe.  Yes, Conrad Veidt was not only a great actor, he could also be fairly called the first horror film star, well before Karloff and Lugosi.  Had he gotten the role of Dracula, or hadn't died so relatively young, he might be a horror film icon today.  At any rate, he was one of the truly memorable film actors of his time and should be remembered by all film fans, not just by horror film fans, today.

Article copyright © Joe Winters

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