Granach, Alexander

(Jessaja Szajko Gronach, 1890-1945)

   Actor. Granach was known for his fiery portrayals of conflicted character types, usually performed in the modernist style Max Reinhardt assiduously cultivated in performers like Gertrud Eysoldt, Alexander Moissi, and Paul Wegener. Granach's background gave him little in the way of formal preparation for the acting profession. He was an Ostjude from Galicia who was uneducated, uncultured, and unhealthy—but consumed with a passionate, uncompromising ambition to become an actor. He ran away from home at age 12, and by the time he was 19, he was working with an amateur Jewish theater group in Berlin. There he began study at Reinhardt's acting school, and in the next five years Granach began to get roles with Reinhardt and other managers in Berlin.

   Drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army in 1914, he fought on the Italian front until his capture and spent the remainder of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. He returned to Berlin in 1920 and soon thereafter began acting in silent films. Among the most notable were F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Erdgeist (Earth Spirit, 1923), although he made more than a dozen others. In the meantime, his work with Reinhardt continued, playing nearly every night through the 1920s in character roles at the Deutsches Theater or its adjoining Kammerspiele. He won his widest acclaim, however, as Shylock at the Munich Kammerspiele.

   The election of the National Socialist government in 1933 meant an abrupt end to Granach's work in Germany. He emigrated to Poland and then to the Soviet Union, where he appeared mostly in films; in 1937 Granach barely escaped death during the first of Stalin's attempts to "cleanse" Soviet cultural activity. In 1938, with the help of Lion Feuchtwanger (1884-1958), Granach emigrated to New York. In 1939 he arrived in Hollywood in time to play a Soviet apparatchik in Ninotchka with Greta Garbo. That movie established him in Hollywood, allowing him to remain and work there until his death. Granach wrote an eminently readable autobiography, Da geht ein Mensch (English title: There Goes an Actor), which exquisitely captured the tragedies and triumphs of his life; it proved to be so popular after its publication in 1945 that it subsequently appeared in numerous translations.