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Actor, born in Germany on the 7th of November, 1886, died on the 11th of November, 1954.
Gay: 7 out of 9 |
Lesbian: N/A |
Trans: N/A |
Queer: N/A |
Film historians agree Schünzel was gay, but I can find no reference to his ever being out during his lifetime.
Reinhold Schünzel was born on the 7th of November, 1886 in Hamburg, Germany. Like most, he started his career as a stage actor, but was intent on getting into the film industry, which he managed to do in 1916 after a friend got him cast in Carl Froelich’s Werner Krafft. He proved naturally adept at playing villains.
In that same year, he met the director Richard Oswald and began working for him, acting in many of his films, including 1919’s Different From the Others, in which he plays Franz Bollek, the blackmailer. It was from Oswald that he primarily learned the film trade, and he soon found himself not only an actor, but a writer and director as well.
In the sound era, his success continued. Though half-Jewish, his fame and popularity granted him “Honorary Aryan” status from the Nazi party, which allowed him to keep working after the 1933 blacklisting of Jewish actors.
In 1933, he wrote and directed the drag musical Victor and Victoria (the original on which the better known 1982 Victor/Victoria is based) and he was the director of the popular 1934 escapist comedy The English Marriage and the most successful German film of 1935, the musical comedy Amphytrion.
Despite his fortunate place in the German film world, by the later ‘30s, he grew increasingly tired of the Nazi party and its interference in movie making and left for the USA. There, he would direct Ice Follies of 1939 and play Nazi villains, ironically enough, in Hangmen Also Die and The Hitler Gang. He was also featured as Dr. Anderson in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.
He returned to Germany after the war and acted in four more films before dying of heart disease in Munich on the 11th of November, 1954.
Aliases
Films
[ Gay feature | Lesbian feature | Trans feature | Queer feature ]
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