Max Schreck: Not Just Nosferatu

100 years ago today in New York City, the Universal horror film The Phantom of the Opera was receiving its world premier. In related news, on that same day, 4,000 miles east of New York, Friedrich Gustav Maximilian “Max” Schreck (1879-1936) was celebrating his 46th birthday. Just three years earlier, of course Schreck had made his own indelible mark (two of them, actually, on several necks) on horror cinema by creating the role of Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922). Robert Eggers’ recent remake of that film is still fresh on everyone’s minds, so this seems a good moment to visit the topic — though, as the title communicates, my objective will be to demonstrate that the actor had vastly more going on than the single role that he is today generally reduced to.

Max Schreck played hundreds of parts throughout his stage and screen career, and appeared in nearly 50 films. He was trained at the Berliner Staatstheater and appeared in regional theatres throughout Germany, though he came to fame as a member of Max Reinhardt’s company. Most of Schreck’s parts were supporting roles. He was reportedly a strange guy, a loner, who specialized in playing grotesques. It stands to reason that his one major starring part was this monster. Some other stuff Max Schreck acted and performed in:

Schreck played the “freakshow landlord” Glubb in the original 1922 stage production of Bertolt Brecht’sDrums in the Night. He was also in Brecht’s 1923 film Mysteries of a Barbershop.

After working with F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu, Schreck was also in his 1924 comedy The Grand Duke’s Finances.

Some of Schreck’s other films included Nathan the Wise (1922), The Street (1923), The Merchant of Venice (1923), Doña Juana (1927, a gender reversed telling of Don Juan), Luther (1928), and William Dieterle’sLudwig II, King of Bavaria (1929).

Schreck appeared in an anti-fascist cabaret show called Die Pfeffermühle put on by Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter in early 1933. It was shut down by the Nazis shortly after they came to power. Unlike many and most of his colleagues, including all the ones I’ve mentioned here (Reinhardt, Brecht, Murnau, Dieterle, Mann), Schreck chose not to leave Germany and apparently felt no need to flee the Nazis. He continued to act in theatre and film in his native country right up until his death by heart attack in 1936.

For many years there was a kind of conspiracy theory out there that Schreck didn’t really exist. One variation was that someone else played his role in Nosferatu. Another (one we preferred to believe as children) was that he actually WAS a vampire. This was the basis for the delightful 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, in which Willem Dafoe played the actor. And so indelible was the performance and the film itself, that it has been remade a couple of times, not just the recent one, but also Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre (with Klaus Kinski in the Schreck role).

This TERRIFIC article came out in Vanity Fair last Halloween. I highly recommend it for those want to know much more about the life and legend of Max Schreck.