aikainkauna:aikainkauna:spyvstailor:celkali:sexyolddudes:Conrad VeidtA great profile about Veldt by

aikainkauna:aikainkauna:spyvstailor:celkali:sexyolddudes:Conrad VeidtA great profile about Veldt by Jerry Ochoa over at Birth, Movies, Death: (x)@spyvstailorOk. I finally had a chance to read this. And holy hell! Read this guys!#i didn’t know about half of this stuff #shit i didn’t think it possible to love him moreBelieve it or not, it is; it gets better:) It’s a good article, even if it has a fair few mistakes and typos (the author keeps calling him “Viedt” six times and gets the names of several other people and films wrong… come on). So let me correct a few bits and bobs here just so people will know how it really went down. Welcome to Conrad Veidt, awesome and underrated and under-explored actor and amazing, amazing human being.Some background info to start with: he really, really, really was hardcore about human rights and what we’d now call social justice. -Often his resistance to the Nazis just gets summed up as him having done that because he had a Jewish wife, but he was aligned with liberal causes his whole life, way before he found Lily. Had he survived into the 50s, he would’ve been blacklisted the hell out of Hollywood. These include not just queer rights and anti-racism but also feminism and social reform in general.-He was pro-queer rights not just through the one movie (Different From The Others), or to just prove his chops as an actor (the way many straight actors do today), but it was a matter that concerned him IRL as well. He was bisexual himself, androgynously genderbending and fond of crossdressing; he had several queer friends, one of whom was killed by the Nazis as a warning to him but that didn’t stop him. He participated in the Berlin queer scene and publicly attended gay sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s all-male ball at the Institute For Sexual Research as a guest of honour. And at a time when homosexuality was illegal, when the Nazis were about to start chucking queers into concentration camps, he was about as out a bisexual as a male could be at the time. As in, we haven’t got a statement from him on file saying he loved both women and men in his own words (only the reports of others from over several decades), but it was an open secret and the Nazis most certainly knew about it. I repeat: this guy was the biggest male movie star in Germany and attended gay events publicly as a guest of honour, while still being devoted as hell to his Jewish wife even if the Nazis wanted to kill him for loving her. You cannot possibly make a stronger statement for the validity of bisexuality than that.In addition to Anders, he played in other films with queer content, like a closeted, alcoholic English army captain in Die Andere Seite and the father of the heroine of Der Geiger Von Florenz (which has a happy ending for the crossdressing heroine in a polyamorous bisexual threesome, BTW). There’s queer coding in several other films he starred in (including Casablanca), but those are the most prominent ones. -He also starred in Kreuzzug Des Weibes, a pro-choice film in 1926. I’ve never seen a guy tremble in shock and PTSD the way he does when he hears his girlfriend has been raped and has had to have an illegal abortion: it looks like it’s he who’s gone through it all. He takes upon himself all the suffering this woman, and all women to whom it’s happened, have gone through. I’ve never seen empathy like that from a man IRL and even if it’s difficult to watch, it’s worth it for that alone. -In addition to that, he constantly, repeatedly spoke out against sexism and did not talk down to fangirls nor did he belittle their fantasies. And guess what he did when he got stalkery fangirls? He daddy-dommed them into serving humankind instead. “If you really love me that much, you want to please me, don’t you? Then go and make the world a better place.” Not joking.But now, back to the article itself and my clarifications:-Connie’s first marriage didn’t break up thanks to his superstardom. It was most likely due to his heavy partying and the fact that this partying also included affairs with both women and men. He states that he just couldn’t make things work and just walked out one day and never came back. Gussy, on the other hand, told a far juicier story of having one day found him wearing her brand new, expensive designer dress… with other men also dressed as ladies. She didn’t state what he was doing with those dragged-up friends. They remained good friends afterwards, though.-His third wife, Lily (Ilona, not Llona) wasn’t a German Jew. She was originally Hungarian. And yes, they were as OTP as could be. When he died, she couldn’t even talk about him to anyone afterwards and never dated another man (she survived him for over 40 years, and upon her death, she requested for her ashes to be mixed with his). They saved each other’s lives several times when hiding from the Nazis. (Just have to point that out in case of the obnoxious gayclaimers again. You don’t do that kind of stuff in a lavender marriage.) After meeting her, his entire way of moving and speaking and acting changed, and it was she who was largely responsible for nurturing him into that stunningly powerful figure he became in the talkies–the powerless victim of the silents became the most powerful presence imaginable. -He didn’t write “Jew” on a “race identity card” but on Nazi work forms. You had to fill out your race in your contract over at UFA and in some other official forms, so he scrawled “JEW” in angry block letters there just to piss the Nazis off. But the “race identity card” business is a weird way of putting it.-The incident of the Nazis detaining him was a more complex one than the article implies. He’d already moved to England with Lily by 1934, but had to go back to Germany because he’d signed a contract years before to star in a talkie remake of Wilhelm Tell if they ever made one. So he went over to do that and the excrement hit the propeller, and I’ve scanned the relevant chapter from the (not that great) Allen biography over here. They tortured him with sleep deprivation and harassed him (and god knows what else, considering they knew about his sexuality) but he refused to even raise his hand in the Nazi salute, once. -It was only a few years after this that he was put on Gestapo’s hit list. They had a list prepared of all the persons they’d go and detain (read: take out and shoot in the street) if they ever invaded England. And it wasn’t just because he’d married a Jew that he was on that list, but because he’d saved several people (other “non-Aryans” and queers and liberals) already, giving them money to help them get out of Europe, and smuggling Lily’s parents and sister to safety in his own car through the border. The Gestapo tapped his phone in London because they knew he’d been tipping various people off already, helping them get out. We don’t know how many people he saved in total; we’re not talking Schindler amounts here, but it’s a fair number. Including his Casablanca co-star Paul Henreid, cabaret singer Greta Keller (who was a really good friend of his from way back) and others.-Plus, the Nazis hated him because he went out of his way to play Jewish characters (Jew Suss and The Wandering Jew). The biggest male star of German cinema went off to England and played Jewish characters, sympathetically and loudly, as a middle finger to the Nazis and to show the world Jews were human. That’s about as hardcore as it gets.-The summary at the end says he starred in only two languages, but he also made films in France and Sweden and various other countries. Nitpick, maybe, but still. Other stuff not included in the article: sheltering war kids at his house in Britain, sending Christmas presents to impoverished children during the Blitz, providing spiritual help to hundreds of people after they saw him as an angel/saint in The Passing Of The Third Floor Back and wrote to him, imagining he was an angel IRL (the answer to that would be “yes”), being so sexy he pissed off a silverback gorilla who then proceeded to engage in non-consensual gay watersports at him, off-handedly commenting he was actually practicing spiritist mediumship while acting, NBD, being filmed kissing Jill Esmond and Peter Lorre straight after, writing horrible badfic with Basil Rathbone for drunken lols, and all kinds of other amazing and crazy and wonderful things. And that’s before we’ve even talked much about his acting performances, which are a whole new level in and of themselves.*Exhales* So, you know. Conrad Veidt. Awesome.And he could punch out a Nazi while wearing a sparkly Parisian dress.#this GUY you guys -- source link

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