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Actor, born in Austro-Hungary (now Czech Republic) on the 6th of November, 1899, died on the 25th of May, 2000.
Gay: N/A |
Lesbian: N/A |
Trans: N/A |
Queer: N/A |
Lederer was straight.
Born František Lederer in Karlin, Austro-Hungary (present day Karlín, Czech Republic) on the 6th of November, 1899, Francis Lederer started acting as a teenager on the stage. In 1918, he studied at the Prague Academy of Music and Performing Arts and began performing at the New German Theatre.
He began accepting role in plays in Germany in the latter ‘20s. Coming from a bilingual family, he was fluent in German and often went by the German form of his name, Franz Lederer. His film career started in 1928 when he was cast as Martin in Carl Froelich’s melodrama Refuge. The next year, he would play Alwa opposite Louise Brooks in G. W. Pabst’s masterwork Pandora’s Box.
Lederer’s first talkie, as well as his last silent, was Atlantic, a 1929 docudrama about the sinking of the Titanic. Three versions were filmed simultaneously: one a German talkie, one an English talkie, and the third a silent. He would continue making films in Germany until, in the early 1930s just before Hitler’s blacklisting of Jewish actors, he left for the UK and later the US.
Lederer’s Hollywood career began at the top, with a starring role in 1934’s Man of Two Worlds. He would act in many genres, from screwball comedies like The Gay Deception in 1935 to serious dramas like 1939’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy.
After the war, he returned briefly to Germany, featuring in the 1952 film Adventures in Vienna and Stolen Identity a year later, but by 1954 he was back in the US. His film career was waning by this point and he acted in only a handful more movies, mostly horror and sci-fi, until his retirement from the screen after headlining the 1959 film Terror is a Man. His fall from stardom can be tied to accusations of communist sympathies due to his involvement in the World Peace Federation, which he joined in 1934.
He continued acting on television in shows like That Girl and Mission: Impossible, his last appearance being in a 1971 episode of Night Gallery. Afterwards, he devoted his life to teaching at the American National Academy of Performing Arts, which he himself founded in 1957. He taught there until a week before his death.
Lederer died in Palm Springs, California on the 25th of May, 2000.
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