Background
Werner Krauss was born in Sonnefeld, on 23 July 1884.
Werner Krauss was born in Sonnefeld, on 23 July 1884.
From his film début in 1916 until the advent of talkies Krauss made no less than 104 movies and emerged as one of the outstanding interpreters of the expressionist cinema. He was the malignant Dr Caligari in Robert Wiene’s famous film, starred in Murnau's Tartüff (1925).
In the theatre he excelled in the role of Agamemnon, as the old man Hilse in Hauptmann's Die Weber and as the Captain of Kopenick in Zuckmayer's famous play.
Under the Third Reich, Krauss was made Vice-President of the Reichstheaterkammer (1933-6) and in April 1934 named as an ‘Actor of the State’ (Staats- schauspieler).
His Stakhanovite exertions in Goebbels's dream factory consolidated his position as a celluloid idol - one who was vain, ambitious and infinitely adaptable. Among his best-known performances in these years were as Napoleon I in Franz Wenzler's Hundert Tage (1934), as the anthropologist Virchow in Robert Koch, der Bekampfer des Todes (1939) and in the principal role in Pabst’s film about the famous doctor and alchemist Paracelsus (1942). Most notorious of all was his virtuoso contribution to the anti-semitic movie Jud Süss (1940).
Krauss's sheer dedication to his craft - his pedantic mastery of the gro¬tesque ‘Semitic’ accents of the characters he played in this film - was a macabre testimony to his professionalism. As a result of this film he did not act again for several years after the war.
He became an Austrian national in 1948 and died in Vienna on 20 October 1959.