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Fritz Lang was born in Vienna in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien, then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914 he traveled in Europe and, he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris in 1913-14. At the start of the First World War he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely injured in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918 he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzahl. In 1920 he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, and M (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year. Goebbels offered to Lang to assume the German Cinema Institute (which was accepted by Leni Riefenstahl later). Lang did not accept (he did not agree with Nazi ideology and he was temerary since his mother was a Catholic converted) and left Berlin for Paris, smuggling out large amounts of money. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934. He was initially under contract to MGM. Over the next twenty years he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, because the film industry was in economic decline and because he had acquired a reputation for being difficult, Lang found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s Lang made his last three films, in German, which were not well received. In 1964, nearly blind, he was president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. As a director Lang had a reputation for being abusive to actors. He collected primitive art and habitually wore a monocle. From about 1931 to his death in 1976, while dating other women, he was close to Lily Latté, who helped him in many ways. |
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