Trivia: Before becoming a distinguished German actor, Alfred Abel worked a wide variety of jobs, ranging from forester to bank clerk to designer. In 1913, he caught the eye of Asta Nielsen, who helped him break into show business. Abel went on to be one of the best actors in early German films such as Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922) and Metropolis (1927). Abel became a director in the early '30s and made three films before he died in 1937.

Trivia: Brigitte Helm is one of a unique group of iconic actresses; like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Louise Brooks, her face and image are recognized across generations, and in most corners of the world, and all for one movie, and two roles: Maria, the Madonna-like (as in biblical Madonna, not the singer/actress) teacher, and her robot counterpart, in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). Helm was born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm in Berlin, in 1908, the daughter of a Prussian army officer, who left his wife a widow not long after. Although she was never entirely comfortable as an actress, or as a performer, Helm was a striking beauty from an early age, and her mother sent photos of the girl to director Fritz Lang and his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, in the early '20s. Helm was invited to the set of Die Nibelungen, and was given a screen test, which led to her being cast in the dual role of Maria and her evil robot double in Lang's Metropolis (1927). The 17-year-old Helm put up with more than her share of aches and pains during shooting, and even risked some serious burns in the scene in which the evil Maria twin is burned at the stake -- all of that in addition to hours of difficult and painful makeup sequences involving the creation of the robot. Her efforts and patience paid off, however, as her image became one of the most striking out of German cinema of the 1920s, and one of the most enduring in screen history, familiar to audiences 80 years later.Though Metropolis wasn't a commercial success, Helm got a career coming out of the movie, and she starred in more than three dozen subsequent movies between 1928 and 1935. She did turn down the lead role in The Blue Angel, however, which opened the way for Marlene Dietrich to take the part and shoot to stardom; and Helm's refusal to travel to Hollywood reportedly cost her the role of the monster's bride in The Bride of Frankenstein. In the mid-'30s, Helm married Hugo Von Kunheim, a German industrialist of Jewish descent; in addition to no longer needing to pursue her acting, with which she was never 100-percent comfortable, she was repelled by the takeover of the German movie industry by the Hitler government. Her marital status, coupled with her anti-Nazi political views, made it impossible for Helm to continue working in movies or living in Germany. From 1935 onward, the couple lived in Switzerland. After the war, they divided their time between Germany and Switzerland, but Helm chose to live quietly and remain anonymous, never actively recalling her movie work and refusing all requests to discuss her screen career. She passed away in 1996, at age 88, some 60 years after the role that had immortalized her onscreen.

Trivia: German actor Heinrich George, born Heinze Georg Schulz, began appearing on stage and in films as an adolescent and by the mid 1920s had become a noted character actor. In 1933, he joined the Nazi party and beginning with Hitlerjunge Quex became an actor in many propaganda films including Jew Suess an anti-Semitic film of 1940. Later, George was rewarded for his devotion by becoming the new director of the Schiller Theater, Berlin. George was captured by the Soviets and died in a POW camp.

Trivia: Prominent German character actor Fritz Rasp was best known for playing boorish, lascivious fellows. Rasp began his career on-stage as a member of Max Reinhardt's theater in Berlin. He began playing minor roles in German films in 1915; by the 1920s, he had become a leading character actor in the films of Fritz Lang and other major German directors. Rasp continued appearing in films through the mid-'60s.

Trivia: German actor Gustav Fröhlich played leading roles in many German films and plays. Before becoming an actor in the mid 1920s, he was an editor and a journalist.

Trivia: Rudolf Klein-Rogge was one of Germany's more gifted character actors, in both theater and film, and was a mainstay of Fritz Lang's movies from 1920-1932. Born in Cologne in 1888 (though some sources say 1885), he studied art history in Berlin and Bonn, but his real interest was in the theater. He made his professional acting debut at the age of 20, playing Cassius in Julius Caesar at the Stadttheaer Halberstadt. Soon after, while working in Aachen, he met Thea von Harbou, a young actress and writer with ambition and beauty to whom he became a friend, mentor, and lover. The two married in 1914 and were one of the "power couples" of the era in the arts -- he a gifted and increasingly prominent stage actor in Nuremberg, equally skilled in lead or character roles and, with his thick blond hair, intense eyes, and severe features, appropriate to either, and she a best-selling author with a wide audience. His career suffered a setback, however, when he moved to Berlin and the Lessing Theater, where he was not nearly as well received. Finally, in 1919 (about the same time that his wife began working as a screenwriter and adapting her own work), after some frustrating years of trying to regain his career momentum, Klein-Rogge began acting in movies. He started in smaller, featured roles in such films as Bruno Zeitner's Das Licht Am Fenster (1919), and the following year worked for Fritz Lang for the first time in a supporting role in Das Wandernde Bild. During this period, his wife met and became enamored of Lang, and the two began a romantic affair despite their marriages to others. Klein-Rogge and von Harbou were separated in 1920 and later divorced, while Lang's first wife committed suicide, freeing him and von Harbou to marry in 1922. From 1920-1932, von Harbou wrote or co-wrote the screenplays to all of Lang's movies, which are generally regarded as the finest body of films in his four-decade output. Ironically, the former couple's separate contacts with Lang proved the salvation of Klein-Rogge's career even as it doomed his marriage. By 1921, the actor was playing leads in Lang's movies and, as the director's films became known and his audience grew, Klein-Rogge found himself elevated to major star status both in Germany and around the world. His best early performance in a Lang movie was that of a criminal mastermind -- and the title role -- in Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922). He had a succession of other prominent parts in Lang's films, culminating with the caped, beak-nosed inventor Rotwang in Metropolis in 1927. He later had major roles in Spies (1929) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), and remained a star until that time. With the Hitler government's rise to power in 1933 and Lang's resulting departure from Germany, however, Klein-Rogge's status as a screen actor was quickly reduced. He was relegated to ever-smaller roles over the next eight years, including work in Elisabeth und der Narr (1934), written and directed by von Harbou. As the Nazi era progressed, Klein-Rogge fell out of favor with Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister and culture czar for the government, and, after working in 80 movies, his career had come to a standstill by 1942. Klein-Rogge remarried twice after his divorce from von Harbou: to Margarete Neff and the Swedish-born actress Mary Johnson. He made one last, uncredited screen appearance in 1949's Hexen, and died in relative obscurity in 1955, a year after von Harbou's death.

Trivia: With the possible exception of Edward G. Robinson, no actor has so often been the target of impressionists as the inimitable, Hungarian-born Peter Lorre. Leaving his family home at the age of 17, Lorre sought out work as an actor, toiling as a bank clerk during down periods. He went the starving-artist route in Switzerland and Austria before settling in Germany, where he became a favorite of playwright Bertolt Brecht. For most of his first seven years as a professional actor, Lorre employed his familiar repertoire of wide eyes, toothy grin, and nasal voice to invoke laughs rather than shudders. In fact, he was appearing in a stage comedy at the same time that he was filming his breakthrough picture M (1931), in which he was cast as a sniveling child murderer. When Hitler ascended to power in 1933, Lorre fled to Paris, and then to London, where he appeared in his first English-language film, Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). Although the monolingual Lorre had to learn his lines phonetically for Hitchcock, he picked up English fairly rapidly, and, by 1935, was well equipped both vocally and psychologically to take on Hollywood. On the strength of M, Lorre was initially cast in roles calling for varying degrees of madness, such as the love-obsessed surgeon in Mad Love (1935) and the existentialist killer in Crime and Punishment (1935). Signed to a 20th Century Fox contract in 1936, Lorre asked for and received a chance to play a good guy for a change. He starred in eight installments of the Mr. Moto series, playing an ever-polite (albeit well versed in karate) Japanese detective. When the series folded in 1939, Lorre freelanced in villainous roles at several studios. While under contract to Warner Bros., Lorre played effeminate thief Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941), launching an unofficial series of Warner films in which Lorre was teamed with his Falcon co-star Sidney Greenstreet. During this period, Lorre's co-workers either adored or reviled him for his wicked sense of humor and bizarre on-set behavior. As far as director Jean Negulesco was concerned, Lorre was the finest actor in Hollywood; Negulesco fought bitterly with the studio brass for permission to cast Lorre as the sympathetic leading man in The Mask of Dimitrios (1946), in which the diminutive actor gave one of his finest and subtlest performances. In 1951, Lorre briefly returned to Germany, where he directed and starred in the intriguing (if not wholly successful) postwar psychological drama The Lost One. The '50s were a particularly busy time for Lorre; he performed frequently on such live television anthologies as Climax; guested on comedy and variety shows; and continued to appear in character parts in films. He remained a popular commodity into the '60s, especially after co-starring with the likes of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone in a series of tongue-in-cheek Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for filmmaker Roger Corman. Lorre's last film, completed just a few months before his fatal heart attack in 1964, was Jerry Lewis' The Patsy, in which, ironically, the dourly demonic Lorre played a director of comedy films.