- Born
- Died
- Birth nameFriedrich Christian Anton Lang
- Height5′ 11″ (1.80 m)
- Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.
In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.- IMDb Mini Biography By: A. Nonymous - He studied at the College of Technical Sciences of Vienna's Academy of Graphic Arts but unhappy with the career path chosen for him by his parents, he ran away to study art in Munich and Paris. He then spent many years travelling the world including Asia. In 1913, he returned to Paris to paint. When World War I began, he was drafted into the Austrian army. After the war, he became a story editor, then screenwriter and actor.- IMDb Mini Biography By: L.H. Wong
- SpousesLily Latte(1971 - August 2, 1976) (his death)Thea von Harbou(August 26, 1922 - April 26, 1933) (divorced)Lisa Rosenthal(February 13, 1919 - September 25, 1920) (her death)
- ParentsAnton LangPauline Lang Schlesinger
- RelativesAdolf Lang(Sibling)Walter Lang(Niece or Nephew)
- All his films feature a shot of his hand
- Usually wore a monocle, and probably only for dramatic effect
- His protagonists are frequently hateful, violent but ultimately sympathetic figures
- His films are dark (both visually and in tone)
- According to Lang himself, on 25 March 1933, two days after The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) had been banned, he was summoned to the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda to meet with Joseph Goebbels himself. Goebbels explained the reason for the ban (the Nazi party slogans are fed into the mouth of the villain at the film's conclusion) and apologized to Lang. He then shocked Lang by offering him the position of production supervisor at the UFA studios, where his first film would be a biography of Wilhelm Tell. Lang claims he suspected a trap and attempted to throw off Goebbels by telling him, "My mother had Jewish parents," to which Goebbels responded, "We'll decide who's Jewish!" Lang then expressed interest in the position and said he needed some time to think it over. He describes how he looked at a clock and how during the entire meeting all he could think about was leaving as soon as possible so he could get to the bank and flee with all of his money. Lang says he didn't get there in time so he sold his wife's jewelry, boarded a train to Paris that same evening, leaving most of his money and personal possessions behind, along with his wife, Thea von Harbou, who divorced him later that year and went on to write and direct films for the Nazi propaganda machine. This story is possibly exaggerated by Lang for dramatic effect because there is evidence he left weeks after that.
- His films, particularly his earlier work, were hugely influential and he was cited as influencing the work of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel and Orson Welles.
- His first wife, Lisa Rosenthal, committed suicide by shooting herself in the chest. It was rumoured that she did this after finding her husband in a compromising situation with Thea von Harbou.
- Lang dubbed Peter Lorre's whistling in M (1931). He felt his off-key whistling was right for the character.
- He claims to have invented "the countdown" for dramatic purposes in his film Woman in the Moon (1929). His use of countdown is the first ever recorded, inspiring real life rocket launch sequences.
- [about CinemaScope] It's only good for funerals and snakes.
- Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship.
- There was a time when all I looked for was a good story, but nowadays everything has to look like the size of Mount Rushmore, and the actors in close-up look as though they belong there.
- I do not like producers.
- [on Erich von Stroheim] In my opinion, there were only two directors in Hollywood who made films without regard to box-office success: Von Stroheim and myself.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content