A Date with Dolly Haas

Unless time has embellished memory, I’m pretty sure I met German-American actress Dolly Haas (1910-1994) in the early ’90s, not long before she died. It would have been on the same occasion when I went to Al Hirschfeld’s upper east side townhouse as a Brentano’s bookseller to get him to sign some copies of his new book. I have vague memories of an elderly wife with a foreign accent meeting us at the door, maybe offering us snacks.

At the time, I had no inkling she had been a stage and screen star in Weimar Germany 60 years earlier. She was just some nice old lady. If there was chit-chat, a prime topic of conversation could certainly have been that her half-English father, raised in Britain, was himself a bookseller. It’s a noble profession!

Born and raised in Hamburg, Haas began ballet lessons at age six. At 17 she went to Berlin where she was cast in a production of The Mikado, and became part of Max Reinhardt’s company at the Großes Schauspielhaus. In 1930 she was cast in Reinhardt’s production Wie werde ich reich und glücklich (How Do I Become Rich and Happy) and in William Dieterle’s film One Hour of Happiness. This was followed by Anatole Litvak’s first film Dolly Gets Ahead (1930). There followed over a dozen starring roles in films, her greatest period of success. She often played adorable, plucky trousers wearing tomboys in her vehicles.

As a Jew, she quite naturally fled Germany upon the Nazis’ ascension to power. Her last German film was Das häßliche Mädchen(The Ugly Girl) (1933), directed by Henry Koster when he was still Hermann Kosterlitz. The film provoked anti-Jewish riots. It was not a good place to be. Haas fled initially to Britain, where she married fellow expat John Brahm (Hans Brahm) and starred in 1936 remake of D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. This was followed by Spy of Napoleon (1936) opposite Richard Barthelmess.

The pair moved to Hollywood, where Brahm found steady work as a director but Dolly was relegated mostly to bit parts. Movie she appeared in at this time included Gold Diggers of 1937, Carefree (1938), The Bank Dick (1940), I Married an Angel (1942), and Du Barry Was a Lady (1943). In 1941 the couple split. Brahm went on to do some truly amazing films, the 1944 remake of The Lodger, Hangover Square (1945), The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (1952), and The Mad Magician (1954) among them.

As for Haas, she moved to New York and pursued theatre. Having appeared in Piscator’s production of The Chalk Circle in 1941, she went on to a series of Broadway and off-Broadway roles in Doctor’s Disagree (1943-44), a touring production of Lute Song (1946) opposite Yul Brynner, and Crime and Punishment (1947-48) with John Gielgud and Lillian Gish. In 1953, Alfred Hitchcock gave her a great role in I, Confess, and she did a little television. She then returned to the New York theatre, appearing in Anastasia (1954-55), Threepenny Opera (1956-61), and Brecht on Brecht(1963).

In 1943, Haas married Hirschfeld. Their famous daughter Nina was born in 1945.

She is apparently unrelated to Hugo Haas.