Lil Dagover

A prominent German film actress born on 30 September 1887 at Madiven, Java, the daughter of a forest ranger in the service of the Dutch authorities.

In 1897, when she was ten, her parents sent her back to Europe to continue her education in boarding schools in Baden-Baden, Weimar and Geneva, Switzerland. Orphaned at the age of 13, she spent the rest of her adolescence with friends and relatives.

Sent at the age of ten to Baden-Baden to study, she later entered the cinema thanks to her marriage in 1917 to the actor Fritz Dagover who was 25 years her senior.

They divorced in 1919 but not before he had introduced her to director Robert Wiene and other notables of German cinema.

She made her screen debut in Fritz Lang's Harakiri (1919). Immediately after she appeared in Wiene's classic expressionist film, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (aka The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari Full Sound (1920)).

In 1925 she made her stage debut under the direction of Max Reinhardt. In the following years she played in Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater in Berlin and also at the Salzburg Festival.

In 1926 she married film producer Georg Witt, who would produce many of Dagover's future films. The couple would remain married until Witt's death in 1972.

Apart from three trips -- one to Sweden in 1927, another to France in 1928-9 and one to Hollywood in 1931 -- most of Lil Dagover's career and fate was linked to that of the German cinema, where her role was usually that of the frail, menaced heroine. She continued to star in a great number of films during the Nazi era.

Among her best performances were her roles in Der Kongreß tanzt (1931), in Gerhard Lamprecht's The Higher Command (1935) and in Veit Harlan's The Kreutzer Sonata (1937). She also acted in the Deutsches Theatre Berlin, the Salzburg Festival, at forces shows and at war theaters. At one time, she was reported to have been a close friend of Adolf Hitler.

After her return to Germany and the rise of the Third Reich in 1933, she avoided overt political involvement and generally appeared in popular costume musicals and comedies during World War II. However, in 1937, she received the State Actress award, and in 1944 she was awarded the War Merits Cross for entertaining Wehrmacht troops on the Eastern Front in 1943 and 1944 on the German occupied Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey.

In 1944, she received the War Merits Cross.

In 1961 she achieved a great succès d'estime with her role as a eccentric old woman in the Edgar-Wallace adaption "Die seltsame Gräfin" - a role type which she also impersonated more and more at the stages too.

In 1962, Lil Dagover was awarded the Bundesfilmpreis. In 1964, she was awarded the Bambi annual television and media award from Hubert Burda Media, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1967.

In 1979, she published her autobiography, Ich war die Dame (English: I Was The Lady).

Dagover died at the age of 92, on January 24, 1980, in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, and was buried at the Waldfriedhof Grünwald cemetery, in Munich.