Hans Walter Conrad Veidt ( FYTE, German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈfaɪt]; 22 January 1893 – 3 April 1943) was a German and British character 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 became a British subject 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. Knowing that the family could not afford to pay the lofty fee that accompanied the surgery, the doctor charged only what the family could comfortably pay. Impressed by the surgeon's skill and kindness, Veidt vowed to "model my life on the man that saved my father's life" and he wished to become a surgeon. His hopes for a medical career were thwarted, though, when, in 1912, he graduated without a diploma and ranked 13th out of 13 pupils and became discouraged over the amount of study necessary for him to qualify for medical school.
A new career path for Veidt opened up in 1911 during a school Christmas play in which he delivered a long prologue before the curtain rose. The play was badly received, and the audience was heard to mutter, "Too bad the others didn't do as well as Veidt." Veidt began to study all of the actors he could and wanted to pursue a career in acting, much to the disappointment of his father, who called actors 'gypsies' and 'outcasts'.
With the money he raised from odd jobs and the allowance his mother gave him, Veidt began attending Berlin's many theatres. He stood outside of the Deutsches Theater after every performance, waiting for the actors and hoping to be mistaken for one. In the late summer of 1912 he met a theatre porter who introduced him to actor Albert Blumenreich, who agreed to give Veidt acting lessons for six marks. He took 10 lessons before auditioning for Max Reinhardt, reciting Goethe's Faust. During Veidt's audition, Reinhardt looked out of the window the entire time. He offered Veidt a contract as an extra for one season's work, from September 1913 to August 1914 with a pay of 50 marks a month. During this time, he played bit parts as spear carriers and soldiers. His mother attended almost every performance. His contract with the Deutsches Theater was renewed for a second season, but by this time World War I had begun, and on 28 December 1914, Veidt enlisted in the Imperial German Army.
In 1915, he was sent to the Eastern Front as a non-commissioned officer and took part in the Battle of Warsaw. He contracted jaundice and pneumonia, and had to be evacuated to a hospital on the Baltic Sea. While recuperating, he received a letter from his girlfriend Lucie Mannheim, telling him that she had found work at the Front Theatre in Libau.
Intrigued, Veidt applied for the theatre as well. As his condition had not improved, the army allowed him to join the theatre so that he could entertain the troops. While performing at the theatre, his relationship with Mannheim ended. In late 1916, he was re-examined by the Army and deemed unfit for service; he was given a full discharge on 10 January 1917. Veidt returned to Berlin where he was readmitted to the Deutsches Theater. There, he played a small part as a priest that got him his first rave review, the reviewer hoping that "God would keep Veidt from the films" or "God save him from the cinema!"
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. During this period, he lent his expertise to tutoring aspiring performers, one of whom was the later American character actress Lisa Golm.
Veidt opposed the Nazi regime and later contributed funds for the relief of Britons during the German Blitz bombings. Soon after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, by March 1933, Joseph Goebbels was purging the film industry of political opponents and Jews. In April 1933, a week after Veidt's marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, also known as "Lilli" or "Lily", the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them.
Goebbels had imposed a "racial questionnaire" in which everyone employed in the German film industry had to declare their "race" to continue to work. When Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about his Rasse (race) by writing Jude (Jew). Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was, and Veidt would neither renounce the woman he loved nor collaborate with the regime as many others did.
Veidt was opposed to antisemitism and showed solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of 1933. Veidt had been informed that if he divorced and declared support for the new regime, he could continue to act in Germany. Several other leading actors unsympathetic to the Nazis before 1933 switched allegiances. In answering the questionnaire by stating he was a Jew, Veidt rendered himself unemployable in Germany, but stated this sacrifice was worth it as there was nothing in the world that would compel him to break with his wife. Goebbels remarked that he would never act in Germany again. He was put under house arrest on Goebbels' orders after he voiced his wishes to act in the British film Jew Süss. Only after a diplomatic intervention on the part of the British government was he allowed to leave. The German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter wrote on this in 1933 that "It is known that the Jewish film production in England produced two coarse, sensational films for purposes of Jewish propaganda: the film Wandering Jew and a second film - Jud Süss. [...] Conrad Veidt plays leading roles in both. [...] Conrad Veidt was paid for this betrayal of his country – by the praise of the Jewish public. As such, he no longer possesses enough human dignity that even one single person should utter a word of praise for him."