Background
Gustaf Gründgens was born in Düsseldorf on 22 December 1899.
Gustaf Gründgens was born in Düsseldorf on 22 December 1899.
He began his theatrical career as an actor in Hamburg in the mid-1920s and by the end of the decade had achieved a considerable impact in the Berlin State Theatre.
His performance as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust was the sensation of the 1931-2 season. Subsequently, Grundgens was appointed as Director General of the Prussian State Theatre in October 1934.
Grundgens had established himself as a movie actor with his role as the chief gangster in M, the first sound film of Fritz Lang.
Gründgens also gave memorable performances as Professor Higgins in Erich Engel's Pygmalion (1935) and as a decadent, dandyish Joseph Chamberlain, replete with monocle and flower in his buttonhole, in the anti-British film.
Grundgens's earlier communist sympathies did not affect his career in Nazi Germany and he even enjoyed the support of Hermann Goering, through whom he was made a Prussian State Councillor in 1936. He continued as Generalintendant of the Prussian State Theatre until 1945.
He eventually committed suicide in Manila on 7 October 1963.
His life inspired the recent film Mephisto (1981), based on a controversial novel by Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann.
Grundgens was married to the famous actress, Marianne Hoppe - his earlier marriage to the daughter of Thomas Mann had been dissolved - and managed to maintain his popularity as a glamorous screen idol throughout and even beyond the Third Reich.
