Alexander Granach

Alexander Granach (April 18, 1890 – March 14, 1945) was a popular German actor in the 1920s and 1930s.

Biography

Granach was born Jessaja Granach in Werbowitz (Wierzbowce/Werbiwci) (Horodenka district, Austrian Galicia then, now Verbovtsy, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine) to Jewish parents and rose to theatrical prominence at the Volksbühne in Berlin. Granach entered films in 1922; among the most widely exhibited of his silent efforts was the 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu, in which the actor was cast as Knock, the lunatic counterpart to Dracula's Renfield. He was co-starred in such major early German talkies as Kameradschaft (1931). Granach, being Jewish, fled to the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power. When the Soviet Union also proved too inhospitable, he settled in Hollywood, where he made his first American film appearance as Kopalski in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. Granach proved indispensable to big-studio filmmakers during the war years, effectively portraying both dedicated Nazis (he was Julius Streicher in The Hitler Gang) and loyal anti-fascists. Perhaps his most notable role was as Gestapo Inspector Alois Gruber in Fritz Lang's "Hangmen Also Die!" His last film appearance was in MGM's The Seventh Cross (1944), in which virtually the entire supporting cast was prominent European refugees. Alexander Granach's autobiography, There Goes an Actor, was published in 1945, the year of his death. It will be published again in 2010 with the new title, "From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor." (Transaction Publishers.)

Alexander Granach died on March 14th 1945 in New York after an appendectomy from a pulmonary embolism.

His son, Gad Granach, currently lives in Jerusalem and has written his own memoir with many references to his father.

Filmography

• 1922: Nosferatu
• 1922: Lucrezia Borgia
• 1923: Erdgeist
• 1923: Paganini
• 1923: Der Mensch am Wege
• 1923: Schatten - Eine nächtliche Halluzination
• 1923: I.N.R.I.
• 1924: Ein Sommernachtstraum
• 1926: Qualen der Nacht
• 1928: Das letzte Fort
• 1928/29: Großstadtschmetterling
• 1930: Die letzte Kompanie
• 1931: Danton
• 1931: Der Raub der Mona Lisa
• 1931: Kameradschaft
• 1936: Bortsy
• 1939: Ninotchka
• 1941: So Ends Our Night
• 1941: A Man Betrayed
• 1942: Joan of Paris
• 1943: Hangmen Also Die!
• 1943: For Whom the Bell Tolls
• 1944: The Seventh Cross

External links

• Alexander Granach at the Internet Movie Database

Literature

• Alexander Granach: There Goes an Actor, Doubleday, Dorian and Co, Inc., Garden City 1945, ASIN B0007DSBEM
• Alexander Granach: Da geht ein Mensch, Ölbaum-Verlag, Augsburg 2003, (Neuauflage) ISBN 3-927217-38-7
• Alexander Granach: From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor. Transaction Publishers, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4128-1347-1
• Albert Klein/Raya<Kruk: Alexander Granach: fast verwehte Spuren, Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-89468-108-X
• Gad Granach: Heimat los!, Ölbaum-Verlag, Augsburg 1997, ISBN 3-927217-31-X; Random House/Bertlesmann edition, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-442-73630-0
• Gad Granach: Where is Home? Stories from the Life of a German-Jewish Émigré, Atara Press, Los Angeles 2009, ISBN 978-0-982-22511-0

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