Casablanca's Nazi villain was played by an actor who defied Goebbels
When Goebbels made German film workers declare their race in 1933, Conrad Veidt, who was not Jewish, wrote Jude to stand with his Jewish wife. It ended his German career. He fled to Britain, gave much of his savings to its war effort and later played Major Strasser in Casablanca.
Veidt was born in Berlin on 22 January 1893, the son of a strict, deeply conservative civil servant and an affectionate mother. After a surgeon operated on his ailing father for a fee the family could afford, the boy resolved to become a doctor, but he finished school in 1912 without a diploma, last of 13 pupils. A school Christmas play the year before had already hinted at another path: the audience grumbled that the rest of the cast fell short of Veidt. After ten paid lessons he auditioned for Max Reinhardt with a speech from Goethe's Faust, and Reinhardt, gazing out of the window throughout, hired him as an extra for 50 marks a month.
War interrupted. He enlisted in December 1914, fought at the Battle of Warsaw, fell ill with jaundice and pneumonia, and entertained troops at a front theatre before being discharged in 1917. One early critic prayed that the cinema would never claim him. It did: he made over 100 films, playing the sleepwalking Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920 and the grinning outcast of The Man Who Laughs in 1928, the image that later inspired Batman's Joker. He also appeared in Different from the Others, among the first films to treat homosexuality with sympathy, and had a lead in Germany's first talking picture.
Veidt married Ilona Prager in April 1933 and the couple left for Britain a week later. Offered continued work in exchange for divorcing her and backing the regime, he refused. When he wanted to star in the British film Jew Süss, Goebbels placed him under house arrest, and only British diplomatic pressure freed him. In Britain he became a subject in 1939 and made films including The Thief of Bagdad for Michael Powell.
Around 1941 the Veidts moved to Hollywood to help make films that might nudge a neutral America toward war. Expecting to be cast as Nazis, he insisted by contract that such characters always be villains. Casablanca was the last of his films released in his lifetime; he died on 3 April 1943.
Source: Conrad Veidt
