Full Name Jessaja Gronach Name Alexander Granach Other names Jessaja Granach Role Actor | Occupation Actor Years active 1920–1944 Children Gad Granach | |
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Partner(s) Lotte Lieven ( 1933-1945) his death Died March 14, 1945, New York City, New York, United States Spouse Martha Guttmann (m. 1914–1921) Movies Nosferatu, Ninotchka, Warning Shadows, Hangmen Also Die!, For Whom the Bell Tolls Similar People Henrik Galeen, Fritz Arno Wagner, F W Murnau, Arthur Robison, Richard Oswald | ||
Moyshe gershenson z libin joel engel alexander granach
Alexander Granach (April 18, 1893 – March 14, 1945) was a popular German actor in the 1920s and 1930s who immigrated to the United States in 1938.
Contents
- Moyshe gershenson z libin joel engel alexander granach
- Alexander granach
- Life and career
- Literature
- Filmography
- References
Alexander granach
Life and career
Granach was born Jessaja Gronach in Werbowitz (Wierzbowce/Werbiwci) (Horodenka district, Austrian Galicia then, now Verbivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine), to Jewish parents and rose to theatrical prominence at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Granach entered films in 1922; among the most widely exhibited of his silent efforts was the vampire classic Nosferatu (1922), in which the actor was cast as Knock, the lunatic counterpart to Renfield, effectively a substitute name for Dracula. He co-starred in such major early German talkies as Kameradschaft (1931).
The Jewish Granach fled to the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power. When the Soviet Union also proved inhospitable, he settled in Hollywood, where he made his first American film appearance as Kopalski in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Granach proved indispensable to film makers during the war years, effectively portraying both dedicated Nazis (he was Julius Streicher in The Hitler Gang, 1944) and loyal anti-fascists. Perhaps his best role was as Gestapo Inspector Alois Gruber in Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1943). His last film appearance was in MGM's The Seventh Cross (1944), in which almost the entire supporting cast was prominent European refugees.
Granach died on March 14, 1945 in New York from a pulmonary embolism following an appendectomy. He was buried in Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, Queens. Alexander Granach's autobiography, There Goes an Actor (1945) was republished in 2010 under the new title, From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor (Transaction Publishers). His son, Gad Granach, lived in Jerusalem and wrote his own memoirs with many references to his father.
Literature
