Submitted by
Roger Mellor
From an unidentified British newspaper marked 5th April 1943
Mr. Conrad Veidt
Villainy on the screen
Mr Conrad Veidt, the film actor, died in America on Saturday from
a heart attack while playing golf. He was 50 and had been a naturalized
British subject since 1939.
Veidt, whose full name was Hans Walter Konrad Veidt, was born in Berlin
on
January 22, 1893, and educated at Berlin High School.
He was a pupil of Max Reinhardt and played on the stage with Emil
Jannings. Before going to England and America, he made a reputation as an
accomplished actor on the German screen. With Werner Krauss he appeared
in such notable silent films as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
and The Student of Prague, and he took a leading part with
Jannings and Krauss in Waxworks (1924). In later years it
was Veidt's fate to play the parts of Nazi agents, spies, and other
suspicios characters. he was never - latterly, at least - an actor to
sieze hold of the imagination and make more of a character than the
script intended, but with his tall, spare figure, faintly broken
accent, and features he could compose into an assumption of haughty
brutality, of aloof and disdainful villany, he made a very proper
person to be put away in the last reel of the film. Even when he was
allowed to play the hero there clung to his screen personality a faint
flavour of the sinister. He will be remembered as Mettnich in
Congress Dances. The best known British films in which he
appeared were Jew Suss, Rome Express, Nazi Agent
and Contraband. He was twice married and leaves a widow.
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