Lionel Royce

Lionel Royce was an Austrian-American actor whose career spanned European stage work and American film. Born in Dolyna, he studied at Vienna's Academy of Music and Performing Arts before making his stage debut in 1919 as the Duke of Albany in King Lear, mentored by Rudolph Schildkraut. He went on to Munich's Kammerspiele and the Berlin State Theater, where he gained fame under Leopold Jessner and also worked with Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. After moving to the United States in 1937, he made his American film debut in Marie Antoinette in 1938. Over the next eight years he appeared in nearly forty films, including Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Charlie Chan in Panama (1940), and The Son of Monte Cristo (1940). His final film was Gilda, released in 1946, the year he died.