In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies. |
It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played. |
It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being. |
It was like a physical impact, something vital and quick, happening to us both. And I knew, from that moment, that whatever happened between us, we might disagree, get on each other's nerves, quarrel, do each other harm, but we could never be indifferent. |
Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next. |
My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son. |
My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing. |
No, I was not born with a monocle in my eye. |
Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough. |
So now it is time to disassemble the parts of the jigsaw puzzle or to piece another one together, for I find that, having come to the end of my story, my life is just beginning. |
The one thing I look for everywhere is beauty. I find it everywhere, and in almost every person. A lovely painting, a good book, or music moves me. It has a life of its own. But I get just as satisfying a thrill when I look at streets wet with rain or see a typist's quick fingers traveling with precision over her keyboard. |
The right partner in a film is equal to half the audience! |
There must have been something in my nature - I believe, with all my heart, that I have conquered it now - which prevented me from being perfectly happy or making a woman perfectly happy. |
What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor. |
When I was in a play in a theater, and all was going well on stage, I felt that the audience and I were somehow joined into one. |