Sig Arno
Siegfried Arno (actually Siegfried Aron, from 1940, Sig Arno, born 27 December 1895 in Hamburg, † August 17, 1975 in Woodland Hills, California ) was a German actor, comedian, singer and dancer.
Life and work
Arno attended the Talmud Torah school in Hamburg and then completed training as a fashion designer at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts. He was a member of the Hamburg theater club and had his first appointments at the City Theatre in Harburg and at the opera. After the First World War, he worked in Hamburg, Prague, and from 1921 in Berlin. In the same year he made his film debut in The Red Cat. Since the mid-1920s Arno was constantly in the film, mainly in comedies. Initially, it was his younger brother Bruno Arno to the side.
The large and lanky Arno with a pronounced nose made several times a comedy duo with the corpulent Kurt Gerron. In Georg Wilhelm Pabst's The Love of Jeanne Ney and Pandora's Box Arno played small supporting roles as a detective or Theaterinspizient.
With the beginning of the sound film Arno succeeded in the early 1930s as a springboard to the star of a series grotesque comedies: there are among the the fairground, Moritz makes his fortune, The stork is on strike, a crafty boy, No celebration without Meyer, order one-upmanship and The most beautiful man in the state. Arno was at the time as " German Chaplin ".
In 1933 he emigrated from Germany and worked at cabarets and theaters in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. In 1939, he finally landed in the United States, where he found employment as a supporting actor, for example, in William Dieterle's The Hunchback of Notre Dame ( 1939) and comedies like The Great Dictator (1940 ), In hell the devil is going on (1941 ) Breathless and to Florida (1942 ). In addition, he worked as a draftsman and portrait painter and worked on Broadway, 1954 at the Deutsches Theater New York. 1956 Arno was brought by Marcel Prawy to Vienna, where he played at the Vienna Volksoper in the musical Wonderful Town by Leonard Bernstein on the side of Bruce Low and Olive Moorefield. Guesting abroad again, even in the FRG, where he received the 1966 Film Award for many years of excellent work in the German film.
Arno was 1922-1932 married to actress Lia Dahms, 1934-1953 with Barbara Kiranoff, starting in 1953 with the Austrian actress Kitty Mattern. His son Peter (born 1926) from his first marriage was a costume and set designer.