Brigitte Helm German actress Date of Birth: 17.03.1908 Country: Germany

Biography of Brigitte Helm

Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm, a German actress, was born on March 17, 1908, in Berlin. Her father, a Prussian officer, passed away when she was just four years old. From 1916 to 1924, Helm studied at a boarding school in Werftpfuhl, Mark Brandenburg, and performed on the school theater stage. In 1920, she replaced her sister Heidi in a cultural film. In 1924, her mother sent her photograph to director Fritz Lang. Lang invited her for an audition, and the relatively unknown actress was cast in the dual female role in "Metropolis" - Maria and the robot-Maria. Following this, the Ufa film studio offered her a ten-year contract. During the contract period, Brigitte Helm appeared in thirty films, mostly in leading roles. Initially, she was primarily cast as "femme fatale" characters, but later she successfully expanded her range. Some of the most famous films she starred in include Georg Pabst's "The Love of Jeanne Ney" (Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, 1927, based on the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg) and "Abwege" (1928), Henrik Galeen's "Alraune" (1928) and its sound remake in 1930, and Marcel L'Herbier's "L'Argent" (1928). With the advent of sound cinema, Brigitte Helm continued to act successfully and, in some cases, appeared in multiple language versions of films. For example, she acted in the German and French versions of "Gloria" (1931) and the German, French, and English versions of "The Lost Atlantis" (1932), among others. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Brigitte Helm was accused of "racial contamination of the nation" due to her marriage to a Jewish man. In 1935, the actress emigrated to Switzerland, where she lived with her husband, industrialist Hugo Kunheim, and gave birth to four children. She never acted in films again and vehemently refused to give interviews that touched upon her film career. In 1968, she was awarded the national prize "Golden Film Strip" for her outstanding contributions to German cinema. Brigitte Helm passed away on June 11, 1996, in Ascona.