Erik Frey
Erik Frey, Eric Frey ( * March 1, 1908 in Vienna as Erik Viktor Laurenz Emil Frey, † September 2, 1988 ibid ), was an Austrian actor.
Life and work
Frey studied after high school German and took private acting lessons with Albert Heine. In 1927, he made his stage debut and made appearances on popular theater in Vienna and Bremen, Hamburg ( Deutsches Schauspielhaus and Thalia Theatre ) at the Deutsches Theater in Prague and at the State Theater in Berlin.
From 1935 until his death he was a member of the ensemble of Theater in der Josefstadt. In 1948 and from 1962 he worked there as a director. At the Salzburg Festival, he was several times guest performances. The chamber actor Erik Frey embodied by youthful lovers to the tragic hero diverse stage characters, but usually high-ranking personalities.
He received similar tasks in the film, where he was seen since 1936 in numerous roles. He often turned more negative characters are as unsympathetic superiors or coolly calculating rival the real heroes. He frequently appeared as a high-ranking officer in appearance as General Friedrich Olbricht as in It Happened on July 20th ( 1955). Both Ludwig II - splendor and misery of a king as well as Crown Prince Rudolf last love he embodied the Emperor Franz Joseph. In the American film The Cardinal (1963 ) he played the Reich Governor Arthur Seyss- Inquart.
Nazi period
Frey was before the annexation of Austria (from 1934), member of the illegal NSDAP. In his denazification trial, he claimed that he dreamed of a Greater German Reich, but would have had of the atrocities committed no idea. That he had not only idea but in the days of the terminal was very active, but it is established. Frey and actor Robert Horky were 1934/35 commissioned by the Nazi Party, National Socialist to " infiltrate " the theater staff of the Theater in der Josefstadt. On April 23, 1938, the former director of the German folk theater, Rudolf Beer was - along with Max Reinhardt 's most important man of the theater of his time in Vienna - during the performance of Calderon's " The Mayor of Zalamea ", with guest appearances Berlin's Schiller Theater in the Theater in der Josefstadt, by Erik Frey and the acting head of the theater, Robert Valberg, from his box asked out. He should come to a hearing in the Josefstädterstraße 39. From there Beer was driven on the high road. In Wienerwald the Nazi Bat threw the hard abused man out of the car. On May 9, Rudolf Beer turned in his apartment on Lerchenfeldergürtel on the gas tap.
The actor Nicholas Paryla reported Erik Frey, " of even a SA uniform wearing " had his father, Karl Paryla helped shortly after the Anschluss, to leave the country and had thus saved his life: " This man has this uniform at any rate used to save people. Excluding this man my father would not have been saved. "
Erik Frey, who was married in first marriage to actress Jane Tilden and later with actress Susie Witt, is buried in the cemetery Döblinger in Vienna.