Fritz Rasp

Fritz Heinrich Rasp was the thirteenth child of a county surveyor. He was schooled from 1908-1909 at the Theaterschule Otto Königin in Munich where, due to a speech impediment, Rasp developed a Frankish Dialect.

Rasp debuted on the stage in 1909, as Amandus in Max Halbe's "Skandalstück Jugend" as the Münchner Schauspielhaus.

In 1915 he came in contact with the medium film for the first time. The title of his first movie can't be proved, most likely it was the movie "Zucker und Zimt" of director Ernst Matray.

His film career came to a stop when he served in the military from 1916 to 1918 during World War I.

Ilja Ehrenburg, writer of the movie "Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney", wrote about Rasp in later days: "Of all actors in the movie "Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney" in 1927 Fritz Rasp was the one who pleased me most. He looked like a veritable scoundrel. When he bit the girl into her arm and covered the wound immediately afterwards with a dollar note instead of a adhesive plaster, I forgot that an actor was in front of me".

Some of Rasp's more notable film roles were "J. J. Peachum" in The Threepenny Opera (1931), as the reckless seducer Meinert in Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), as Mr. Brocklehurst in Orphan of Lowood (1926), an early German adaptation of Jane Eyre, and as the bank robber Grundeis in Emil and the Detectives (1931).

One of his children was writer Renate Rasp (1935-2015).

Fritz Rasp was awarded with the Filmband in Gold in 1963 for his outstanding work for the German film.

Gräfelfing, Bavaria (Bayern), Germany: Buried at Friedhof Gräfelfing Cemetery. [December 1976]