FRITZ LANG (personality)

Fritz Lang was a legendary movie director from the 1910s to the 1960s. Many consider him the greatest director of all time, and after reviewing his accomplishments, it is easy to see the justification for that accolade! He was born in Austria in 1890. His mother was Jewish, but became Catholic in 1900 (this would be important later in his life). Lang's father was wealthy, and when he was 20, he began traveling the world, and he studied painting in Paris when he was 23 and 24. He then enlisted in the Austrian army at the start of World War I, and he was wounded, and while recovering, he wrote some movie screenplays. At the end of the war, he became a screenwriter in Germany. He quickly rose in stature, and in 1920, he met Thea von Harbou, who was married to Rudolf Klein-Rogge at the time, and Lang began collaborating with her on screenplays from her novels. Soon after he directed some great movies based on screenplays co-written with von Harbou, and the following year she divorced Klein-Rogge and a year later, when Lang's wife committed suicide, they married. They then made some of the greatest German films ever, including Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, and M. In 1933, Joseph Goebbels offered that Lang could become the head of the German Cinema Institute, he refused and left Germany (von Harbou stayed, and they divorced). Lang spent a year in Paris and then moved to the U.S., where he made many great films, including Fury, Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat. Lang made wonderful movies during the silent and sound era and in both Germany and the U.S., and while a few other directors have done the same, no one did it better than Fritz Lang! He passed away in 1976 at the age of 85.