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Curt Bois

Wings of Desire

Curt Bois was born on April 5th 1901 at Ansbacher Straße 28, in Berlin’s Schöneberg district. He was one of four children, his elder sister being the actress and comedian Ilse Bois. They were brought up by their single mother after their father had left them.

He began acting at six years old, and was one of the world’s first child actors in film. His first film role was in the silent movie Bauernhaus und Grafenschloß. In 1909 he played the title role in Der Kleine Detectiv (The Little Detective), and in 1911 he appeared alongside his sister in Shakespeare’s Richard ll at the Circus Busch.

Throughout the Weimar years he toured in vaudeville and cabaret through Germany, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland and in Berlin performed extensively at Trude Hesterberg’s Wilde Bühne. His style of humour and slapstick was often compared to Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.

In 1924 he performed in Quo Vadis, the opening production at the Kadeko alongside Margo Lion and Kurt Gerron. The production was an early satire on Nazism and Hitler’s ‘Beerhall Putsch’ of the previous year. It played over 300 times until May 1926.

Kurt Gerron with Curt Bois 1931 (image: Archiv der Akadamie der Kunst, Berlin)

From cabaret he moved into operetta, working with Max Rheinhardt, Mischa Spoliansky and Friedrich Hollaender.

His biggest hit was in the adaptation of Brandon Thomas’s play Charleys Aunt in 1928/29 and together with Max Hansen, co-wrote the stage comedy Dienst am Kunden (Customer Service) in 1931

He fled Germany in 1933, first for Vienna and then Zurich to join Trude Hesterberg’s cabaret, Corso. From there he and his wife, the singer Hedi Ury, went to Paris to visit Ilse. Here the decision was made to go to America, firstly to New York and eventually to Hollywood. He made his US film debut in 1937 in Hollywood Hotel. His most famous film role of that time was as The Pickpocket in the classic 1942 film Casablanca.

He returned to Germany in July 1950, and a stage production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector. In 1951, he again met Bertolt Brecht and they worked together on the film of Mr Puntilla and his Man Matti.

He continued to work in theatre and film throughout the 1950s and 1960s and then in television during the 1970s and early 1980s.

(image: cyranos.ch)

His final role was in the Wim Wenders film Wings Of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) in 1987, for which he received the award for Best Supporting Actor at the European Film Awards. It was presented to him at The Theater De Westens, where he had first performed eighty years previously.

His eighty-year acting career is longer than any other actor in history and he appeared in over one hundred films in both Germany and the US.

He died on Christmas Day 1991, aged 90, and is buried in Berlin’s Friedhof Wilmersdorf.

Strangely, his grave is unmarked.