Background
Käthe von Nagy, the daughter of a wealthy bank manager and part of an aristocratic Hungarian family, spent very little time at monastery school.
Käthe von Nagy, the daughter of a wealthy bank manager and part of an aristocratic Hungarian family, spent very little time at monastery school.
After 18 months in the convent, she went to high school in Vienna, and then finally to boarding school. During this period, she took riding and fencing lessons. As an young adult, Nagy"s dream was to become an author, also unusual for a woman of her time.
She went to Budapest, where she wrote a few short articles that were eventually published in a magazine.
Shortly after this, she decided to pursue her interest in acting and enrolled in the acting school of Béla Gáal, near Budapest. There she learned acting, dancing, and singing.
Her parents were unhappy about her change of career and frequent moves. In 1926, Nagy moved to Berlin to pursue a career in the film industry, but as she was then unknown, she took a position as correspondent for the Hungarian newspaper Pesti Hírlap to earn a living.
Soon after that she starred in the successful Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume ("Vienna, City of My Dreams"), which made her known as the "up-and-coming young actress of the European cinema".
In 1930s, she starred in Le Capitaine Craddock, which made her notable in France, where she would later make half her movies. From 1937 onwards she was mainly in French-speaking roles, but also appeared in Italian and Austrian film productions. Her last film was the German film Die Försterchristl in 1952, alongside Johanna Matz.
During the Second World War, Nagy virtually retired from the acting industry, appearing in only one movie, Mahlia la métisse.
Because of her notability due to her famous and hugely popular postcards, she was, in 1940, reportedly approached by Reichsführer-Steamship Heinrich Himmler, who asked her to be the face and body for sex dolls provided to German soldiers as a way to combat syphilis at the front, but she refused. This story has come to be considered a hoax, due to the lack of reliable sources backing it up.