ABSTRACT
Dagover, Lil (1897–1980) A prominent German film actress born on 30 September 1897 at Madiven, Java, the daughter of a forest ranger in the service of the Dutch authorities. Sent at the age of ten to Baden-Baden to study, she later entered the cinema thanks to her marriage in 1917 to the actor Fritz Dagover who was twenty-five years her senior. Discovered by the director Robert Wiene (a colleague of her husband's), she appeared in his classic expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and in a number of other prestigious German productions during the early 1920s, including Carl Froelich's Kabale und Liebe (1920), Fritz Lang's Der Müde Tod (1921) and Murnau's Tartuffe (1925). Apart from three trips – one to Sweden in 1927, another to France in 1928–9 and one to Hollywood in 1931 – most of Lil Dagover's career and fate was linked to that of the German cinema, where her role was usually that of the frail heroine with the ‘haunted’ look. She continued to star in a great number of films during the Nazi era, to which she brought a talent and presence they did not always deserve. Among her best performances were her roles in Der Kongress Tanzt (1931), in Gerhard Lam-precht's Der Höhere Befehl (1935) and in Veit Harlan's (q.v.) Die Kreutzerson-ate (1936). She also acted in the Deutsches Theatre Berlin, the Salzburg Festival, at forces shows and at war theatres. At one time she was reported to have been a close friend of Hitler. In 1944 she received the War Merits Cross. Lil Dagover continued her career in postwar Germany, appearing in Königliche Hoheit, Die Barrings (1955), Buddenbrooks (1959) and playing supporting parts until the late 1970s in such films as Der Fussgänger (1974), Der Richter und sein Henker (1975) and Die Standarte (1977). She died in January 1980 in München-Geiselgasteig at the age of eighty-two.
