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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!

Important Added Info: Note that this auction is for a German Ross Postcard that was personally autographed (signed) by Brigitte Helm (our consignor, a very longtime dealer, does not have a certificate of authenticity, but we feel it is extremely likely that the autograph is genuine). It has been attached to a 12" x 18" REPRODUCTION of the Metropolis window card, with stamp hinges, and it is easily removable, so it could be framed with the repro, or framed in a different way.

In the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, it became a common practice to pass out 3 1/2" x 5 1/2" "Ross postcards" to the people who attended a movie. These were postcards that people could send through the mail (each had a picture of one of the movie's stars on it, and standard postcard markings on the other side). But these were also sent to theaters where the stars would make personal appearances, and members of the audience would get the stars to autograph them if they could, but of course, the cards themselves did not come autographed! Sometimes the theaters would use a special "Das Programm Von Heute" that had a blank area on the cover, where they would cut four slits in the upper left and have the "Ross postcards" inserted into that area, so that the audience members would get the program and the card together! We imagine that theaters hoped that audience members would mail the postcards after they saw the movie to friends, telling them how much they enjoyed it, thus creating advertising for the movie. These are often called "Ross autograph cards" by collectors, because moviegoers sometimes obtained autographs on them. Ross postcards are quite collectible, signed or unsigned, but of course, they are worth far more signed. They are often quite rare, because most German paper of all kinds from before World War II was destroyed during the war, due to the massive paper shortages there at that time.

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