Francis Lederer

At 100 years old, Francis Lederer has this physical status:

Lederer started acting when he was young and was trained at the Academy of Music and Academy of Dramatic Art in Prague. After service in the Austrian-Hungarian Imperial Army in World War I, he made his stage debut as an apprentice with the New German Theater, a walk-on in the play Burning Heart. He toured Moravia and central Europe, making a name for himself as a matinee idol in theaters in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Germany. Notable among his performances was a turn as Romeo in Max Reinhardt's staging of Romeo and Juliet.

In the late 1920s, Lederer was lured into films by the German actress Henny Porten and her husband. He worked with G.W. Pabst in Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, and Atlantic (both 1929). He was also notable in The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna in the same year. Lederer, billed as "Franz" at this time, made the transition from silent films to sound films.

In 1931, Lederer was in London to perform on stage in Volpone and the next year in Autumn Crocus by Dodie Smith, which he then performed on Broadway – using the name "Francis" – where it played for 210 performances in 1932 and 1933. He also performed the play in Los Angeles. As the rise of the Nazi movement and the institutionalization of anti-Semitism spread throughout Europe and the political situation there deteriorated, Lederer, who was Jewish, chose to remain in America rather than return home. He became a U.S. citizen in 1939.

Lederer's first American movies were Man of Two Worlds (1934); Romance in Manhattan (1934), with Ginger Rogers; The Gay Deception (1935), with Frances Dee; and One Rainy Afternoon (1936). He was originally cast as the lead opposite Katharine Hepburn in the 1935 film Break of Hearts, but the producers replaced him with Charles Boyer. Irving Thalberg planned to make Lederer "the biggest star in Hollywood" but Thalberg's death ended this possibility.

Although he continued to play leads occasionally – notably as a playboy in Mitchell Leisen's Midnight, with Claudette Colbert and John Barrymore in 1939 – in the late 1930s Lederer began to expand his character parts to include villains. Edward G. Robinson praised Lederer's performance as a German American Bundist in Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, and he earned plaudits for his portrayal of a fascist in The Man I Married (1940) with Joan Bennett. He also played Count Dracula in The Return of Dracula, in 1958.

Throughout his career, Lederer, who studied with Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in New York City, continued to take theater acting seriously, and he performed on stage often in New York City and elsewhere. He appeared in stage productions of Golden Boy (1937); Seventh Heaven (1939); No Time for Comedy (1939), in which he replaced Laurence Olivier; The Play's the Thing (1942); A Doll's House (1944); Arms and the Man (1950); The Sleeping Prince (1956); and The Diary of Anne Frank (1958).

In 1941, he took a break from making films in order to concentrate on his stage work. He returned to the silver screen in 1944, appearing in Voice in the Wind and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and went on to play in films such as Jean Renoir's The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) and Million Dollar Weekend (1948). He took another break from Hollywood in 1950, after making Surrender (1950), and returned in 1956 with Lisbon and the light comedy The Ambassador's Daughter, with Olivia de Havilland. His final film appearance was in Terror Is a Man in 1959.

During the 1950s, he served as honorary mayor of Canoga Park.

Lederer continued to appear on television over the next 10 years in such shows as Sally, The Untouchables, Ben Casey, Blue Light, Mission: Impossible and That Girl. His final television appearance was in a 1971 episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery called "The Devil Is Not Mocked". In it, he reprised his role as Dracula from The Return of Dracula.

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