Harry Liedtke

Personal

Passions

Vocation

Traits

German film actor, popular in the 1920s and the partner of Marlene Dietrich in I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (1929). Liedtke was born to a merchant as the seventh out of 12 children. After the death of his father in 1896, he grew up in an orphanage and began a qualification in retail business. By the chance acquaintance of Hans Oberländer, a stage director at Berlin, he started to take stage classes and was first engaged at the municipal Theater of Freiberg, Saxony. In 1908 Liedtke worked at the New German Theatre in New York City and in 1909 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. In 1912 Liedtke appeared for the first time in the silent movie Zu spät and from then on usually as a young "Charming Boy" and gentleman. With Ernst Lubitsch he made movies like Das fidele Gefängnis (1917), Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918), Carmen (1918), Die Austernprinzessin (1919), Madame Dubarry (1919), Sumurun (1920) and Das Weib des Pharao (1921). He also appeared in several crime stories as Stuart Webbs or Joe Deebs written by Joe May. From 1920 till 1928, Liedtke was married to the actress Käthe Dorsch. On 28 April 1945 Liedtke was killed by Red Army Soldiers in his house at Bad Saarow-Pieskow east of Berlin together with his third wife Christa Tordy. One of the Russians smashed a bottle over his head when he tried to save a young woman who had taken shelter in his apartment from being raped. Link to Wikipedia biography