Background
Paul Henreid was born on 10 January 1908 in Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy.
Paul Henreid was born on 10 January 1908 in Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy.
Along with the Laszlos of Europe, Henreid came west in the late 1930s, first to England and then to America. He lasted throughout the 1940s as an insubstantial romantic support, and it was only when that appeal faded that he took to direction: Victoria the Great (37, Herbert Wilcox); Goodbye, Mr. Chips (39, Sam Wood); Night Train to Munich (40, Carol Reed); Joan of Paris (42, Robert Stevenson); very good with Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (42, Irving Rapper); Between Two Worlds (44, Edward A. Blatt); The Conspirators (44, fean Negulesco); In Our Time (44, Vincent Sherman); The Spanish Main (45, Frank Borzage); Hollywood Canteen (45, Delmer Daves); Deception (46, Rapper); Of Human Bondage (46, Edmund Goulding); Devotion (46, Curtis Bernhardt); as Schumann in Song of Love (47, Clarence Brown); Rope of Sand (49, William Dieterle); Thief of Damascus (52, Will Jason); Siren of Bagdad (53. Richard Quine); Deep in My Heart (54, Stanley Donen); Meet Me in Las Vegas (56, Roy Rowland); Ten Thousand Bedrooms (57, Richard Thorpe); Never So Few (59, John Sturges); Operation Crossbow (64, Michael Anderson); The Madwoman of Clmillot (69, Brvan Forhes); a cardinal in Exorcist II. The Heretic (77, John Boorman).
Ten years after Henreid’s birth, Trieste became Italian. He made his early career on the Austrian stage, but was destined for wider fame as an archetypal refugee, such as Victor Laszlo, the Resistance hero, who sets the mechanism of Casablanca (43, Michael Curtiz) into motion. It is a nice thought that the benign endeavors of everyone in that film except Conrad Veidt save him for noble work in America. Whereas, the real-life Henreid stayed on in Hollywood to direct several pieces of shamelessly crass hokum. What a marvelous cockpit of movie history Casablanca is: looking back to La Regie clu Jen and M; but as capable of anticipating Dead Ringer and that eerie moment in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (61, Vincente Minnelli), when Henreid is once more a Resistance agent whose wife has a neutralist lover.