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Jannings, Emil (1884–1950) Prominent stage and screen actor who was already a great star in the Weimar period and continued to be a highly successful and popular film idol under the Third Reich, Emil Jannings was born in Rohrschach, Switzerland, on 23 July 1884. The son of an American-born father and a German mother, Jannings was raised in middle-class comfort, but ran away from home to become a sailor at the age of sixteen. Two years later he decided to become a professional actor and began his stage career in 1906, appearing in Königsberg, Nuremberg and Leipzig. Discovered by the famous theatrical director Max Reinhardt, he was subsequently given parts at the Deutsches Theatre, emerging as one of the leading stage actors in Weimar. Powerfully built, with an enormous stage presence, Jannings's film debut began in 1919 and his work extended to the end of the Third Reich, establishing him along with Heinrich George (q.v.), Gustaf Gründgens (q.v.) and Werner Krauss (q.v.) as one of a quartet of outstanding movie actors whose careers survived the collapse of republican democracy in Germany. In the 1920s Jannings starred in a number of important and influential films, including his tour de force role in Murnau's Der Letzte Mann (1924), where he played the part of an old doorman of a great hotel, too old for his job, who loses status and self-respect along with his uniform when he becomes a lavatory attendant. Jannings also played the circus acrobat in Dupont's Variété (Variety, 1925) which so impressed Hollywood that he was offered (along with the producer and chief cameraman) an irresistible contract with Paramount and left for America. He won an Oscar in 1927/8 as best actor for his performances in his first two American films, Way of all Flesh (1927) and Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928), but his thick German accent put an end to his Hollywood career with the advent of talking movies. He returned to Germany, starring in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), where he superbly portrayed Professor Rath, the pompous solid citizen enslaved by his passion for Marlene Dietrich.