BRIGITTE HELM

Brigitte Helm was a leading German actress from 1927 to 1935. She quickly became a star in her very first movie, Fritz Lang's Metropolis. She had several other starring roles in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She had several bad breaks. She was Josef von Sternberg's first choice for the starring role in "The Blue Angel", but that role went to Marlene Dietrich. She was supposedly James Whale's first choice for the starring role in "Bride of Frankenstein", but she didn't want to go to America. She was supposedly very unhappy with the Nazi takeover of Germany and Hitler's rise to power, and she had a car accident that resulted in a jail term, and all of this caused her to make a movie in France, after which she moved to Switzerland in 1935 and never made another movie, and she went into isolation, just as much as Greta Garbo did in the U.S. a few years later, and she never gave any interviews. She passed away in 1996 at the age of 90!