Biographies: Hugo Haas - Actor

Biographies

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A Czech actor, born in Brünn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). Hugo Haas was nominated for the WGA Award in 1952 as Best Screenwriter. Hugo married actress Maria von Bibikoff in 1938, and they had a son, Ivan, before they separated in divorce. Hugo Haas’s most important works are The Girl on the Bridge (1951), Skeleton on Horseback (1937), and One Girl’s Confession (1953). Hugo Haas was a bohemian artist and is considered one of the most famous Czech actors of the 1930s. He was a comedic star with a talent for writing, directing, and producing. The Nazi German invasion of his country forced him to take refuge in the United States of America to start from scratch. Haas was born to a Jewish father who worked as a shoemaker. He and his brother, Pavel Haas, studied at the Conservatory in Brno. After graduating in 1920, he began acting in the National Theater in Brno, Ostrava, and Olomouc. He moved to Prague and became a member of the Prague National Theater in 1930 until 1939 when he fled to America. In cinema, he made his first silent film in 1923, and after several silent films, he worked in talkies and began directing in 1933. In 1937, he issued a warning book about the coming dictatorship, which was a convincing attack on the Nazi regime in Germany. After the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, Hugo Haas was dismissed from the national stage because of his Jewish origin and he fled to the USA. He worked as a broadcaster on American radio stations directed to Eastern Europe and worked as a narrator in propaganda films. In the mid-forties, he became an actor in American cinema, worked regularly for MGM, Universal, and Fox, and became a prominent acting teacher in Hollywood. In the fifties, he embarked on an unusually successful career in Hollywood, when he entered independent cinema as a director and producer of low-production films, with a series of melodrama films. He was fought by the studios so much so that his last film, Paradise Alley, was delayed by 3 years to be shown in 1962, and he and his films were rejected. Hugo Haas returned to his homeland in 1961 and worked on Austrian television until the Russian occupier took control of his homeland, Czechoslovakia, in 1968. He died in Vienna, Austria on December 1, 1968, from complications of asthma.

• 9 January 2024
• Toqa Hesham