Ludwig Donath

Ludwig Donath was an Austrian actor who trained in music and drama in Vienna and started out on stage at the Volkstheater in 1919. After an engagement at the Munich Kammerspiele he was soon a prominent stage actor in Berlin, and his first screen role came in 1921 in the silent film Theodor Herzl, as Prince Eugene of Savoy. He moved to the United States in 1940 and appeared in dozens of films, among them Gilda (1946), Sirocco (1951) and The Great Caruso (1951). During World War II he was often cast as Nazi villains, playing Adolf Hitler three times, and he played Al Jolson's father in The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949). In the early 1950s he left Hollywood for New York City, working mostly in television and on Broadway. In 1966 he had a comeback in Alfred Hitchcock's Cold War thriller Torn Curtain, as an East German rocket scientist.