FEATURE - Anton Walbrook

Powell & Pressburger's production company, The Archers, had its own informal acting company. A regular member was Anton Walbrook, who appeared in four of their films - 49th Parrallel - The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp -  The Red Shoes  - Oh Rosalinda!  In these he plays a wide range of characters from a manipulative impresario to a peasant farmer. Walbrook's work is not that widely known or appreciated these days. So who was he?

In all his film performances he appears calm, deliberated, emotionally expressive, way above the abilities of the contemporaries around him. It is significant that Walbrook was frequently given pivotal monologues, the one that gave voice to the central theme and beating heart of the movie. Pressburger, who shared a similar emigre state of mind, wrote these parts with Walbrook in mind. Often bringing in aspects of his own and Walbrooks character or experience for the parts he was to play. Knowing he would be able to make them shine.

Walbrook had this unerring capacity to humanise, to reveal the emotional truth in the words he was given. His subtle vocal range, its light and shade, was able to suggest unspoken feeling and thought, often in an almost throw away manner or gesture. He was one of the most skilled actors of his generation.

Adolf Anton Wilhelm Wohlbruck was born in Austria, the latest generation in a family of actors and performers. He studied with Max Reinhardt and had an extremely successful acting career in Austria and Germany. Handsome, suave and a bit of a dandy, he was considered a heart throb on stage and screen. 

By 1936, the Nazi regime's intentions were now crystal clear. Walbrook found himself in Hollywood doing over dubs on a German film, and decided not to return home. Sensibly he dropped Adolf as his first name, and as Anton Walbrook began his new career. The Americans at first were very suspicious, thinking he might be a spy. Asking him why it had taken him so long to come to his negative assessment of the Nazi's. The same question is asked of Theo in Life & Death of Colonel Blimp. We do not know how Walbrook himself responded. But in the speech Pressburger composed, he speaks of his love for the country of his birth, but hatred for the poisonous regime that had taken it over. He had, understandably, mixed feelings.

Apart from his work for The Archers he performed in many British films. An early version of Gaslight in 1940, and two films about Victoria & Albert playing opposite Anna Neagle, as Prince Albert. These sorts of roles, as 'the good German' or the vaguely continental Northern European foreigner, proved to be his bread and butter. Yet he frequently raised them to be considerably more substantial than that, because of his superlative acting ability.

His acting career spanned over forty years. And though he is best known for his films, he continued doing theatre work through out this period. Then, before the sixties arrived, he didn't so much retire but fade into the background. He only made appearances on German stage and TV later in life. His reasons for retreating from international fame in this way is not clear, and are as elusive to grasp as the personality of Walbrook itself is. There was a unique sophistication to him, but also an air of unknowable secrecy.  Did anyone understand who Anton Walbrook really was, even though they'd acted with him?

Moral Shearer who starred with him in The Red Shoes, said that on set he was a bit of a loner. He wore dark shades all the time and very consciously ate separately from everyone else. Which paints a picture of a quiet, reclusive, introverted man who needed time alone. Someone, perhaps, who would light up only when he performed. Maybe that legendary intensity and charisma he generated on screen, was part of a cathartic release, a mysterious alchemical element in him he needed to nurture. One that necessarily required solitude outside of that. Feeling himself to be an outsider wherever he was.

He'd chosen to leave Germany in 1936 because his family background was mixed race. His Mother, though a Catholic, was from a Jewish background and Walbrook himself was homosexual. His being distantly part Jewish might well have been overlooked, but persistent questioning about his sexuality was beginning to unsettle and frighten him. So doubly vulnerable to Nazi ideological purity he feared for his safety, and fled to settle in Britain whilst he still could.

With regards to his sexuality we are, of course, dealing with a very different era. In the 1930's - 40's being out, or even suggesting you were a gay man, just was not possible. Whether anyone who worked with him knew he was gay, few would think it proper to mention. There are stories of him regularly frequenting gay clubs in Berlin in the 20's and 30's, of affairs with a Norwegian painter, flings on set with Micheal Redgrave. were all rumoured. But none of this became public knowledge because everyone, including Walbrook himself, remained tight lipped. When he could have spilled the beans on his gay life on film sets, he chose not to. He was, either from habit or fear, an intensely private man.

Walbruck died in 1967 at the age of seventy. Though he'd mostly lived in Germany for the previous ten years, his body was returned to Hampstead Cemetery where it was interred. There had been rumours for a while, of an enduring decades long relationship with a local London florist Eugene Edwards. When Edwards died three years later, his body was interred with Walbrook's. The reason given at the time was in recognition of twenty three years of devoted secretarial service, which is a strange explanation. Perhaps this is a new euphemism. In some periods it seems, only in death, when buried three feet in the ground, could two gay men be seen together.