Felix Bressart

The actor Felix Bressart was born as Sally Breslau. He had his first engagement at theater in 1915 and like all great actors in those days he finally went to Max Reinhardt. He became a popular and successful comedian very fast.

Since 1928 he turned up regular in films especially in comedies and military oldies which had a boom at the beginning of the 30s and became very popular because of Bressart.

The first movie in which Felix Bressart acted as a clumsy soldier was "Drei Tage Mittelarrest" (1930). It was a funny but also a bad movie. Later the movie was imposed with a prohibition, not in Germany but in the USA.

With his lanky frame, big nose, toothbrush Moustache and horn-rimmed glasses he looked like someone had decided to cross Groucho Marx with Albert Einstein. The perennial scene-stealer Felix Bressart had two distinct careers as a comic actor: an earlier one, on stage and screen in his native Germany, and a later -- even more prosperous one -- in Hollywood. Trained under Maria Moissi in Berlin, Felix began acting professionally after World War I. He honed his skills in the genres of political parody, musical comedy and slapstick farce in the theatres of Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna (with Max Reinhardt). By 1933, he had established his film acting credentials in popular mainstream movies like Three from the Filling Station (1930) and Die Privatsekretärin (1931).

Like so many other distinguished actors he was forced to leave the German realm after the Nazis took power in 1933. Felix moved via Switzerland and France to a new domicile in the United States where his connections to fellow émigrés like Joe Pasternak and Ernst Lubitsch guaranteed him rapid and steady employment. In Hollywood, Felix joined the regular company of stock players at MGM. He was immediately typecast, his stock-in-trade being disheveled academics, wistful European philosophers, scientists and music professors of diverse ethnicity.

His first major screen success was as one of the Russian commissars in Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), a delightful performance which spawned as similar part being created for him in Comrade X (1940).

The role which ultimately defined his career, in equal parts comedy and pathos, was in the classic wartime satire To Be or Not to Be (1942), as Greenberg, a Jewish member of an acting troupe with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. It seemed, that Felix was still underemployed in films, since he managed to practise as a doctor of medicine on the side.

His last film was My Friend Irma (1949), the movie version of a popular radio show. Bressart died during production, forcing the producers to finish the film with Hans Conried. In the final film, Conried speaks throughout, but Bressart is still seen in the long shots.