OLAF FONSS

Olaf Fonss was a Danish actor/director/writer from the 1910s to the 1930s. He is only known by film buffs today, but he is one of the most important Danish actors ever! He was born in 1882 and started acting on the stage from 1902, but when movies started, he embraced them completely. He was the star of many very early Danish movies, and in 1913, he starred in "Atlantis", which was nearly two hours long, and it was an incredibly ambitious movie! It had a husband with a mentally ill wife, and he has an affair with a ballet dancer, and he takes her on a ship, which sinks in Titanic fashion (which had occurred the year before). He travels the world and has affair after affair, and there are scenes in downtown Manhattan in New York (likely some of the earliest scenes in a movie) and there is a sequence with a sideshow performer with no arms. There is even a "dream sequence" where he imagines he is in the lost underwater city of Atlantis. The movie was made with two endings, one "happy", and one "sad" (for its Russian release). In 1915, Fonss went to Germany to make movies, and in 1916, he starred in Homunculus, one of the most important early horror movies! He soon after returned to Denmark and was a major figure in Danish cinema throughout the 1920s. At the end of the 1920s, he retired from acting in movies, but he directed some movies and he was the President of the Danish Actor's Union from 1933 to 1947, and he also was politically active. Olaf passed away in 1949 at the age of 67. Someday, someone will make a biography of this forgotten giant of early cinema!