Early Life and Work
Veidt was born in a bourgeois district of Berlin, Germany, the son of Amalie Marie (née Gohtz) and Phillip Heinrich Veidt. (Some biographies wrongly state that he was born in Potsdam, probably on the basis of an early claim on his part.) His family was Protestant.
In 1914, Veidt met actress Lucie Mannheim, with whom he began a relationship. Later in the year Veidt was drafted into the German Army during World War I. In 1915, Veidt was sent to the Eastern Front as a noncommissioned officer and took part in the Battle of Warsaw. He contracted jaundice and pneumonia, and had to be evacuated to a hospital on the Baltic Sea. While recuperating, he received a letter from Mannheim informing him that she had found work at a theater in Libau. Intrigued, Veidt applied for the theater as well. As his condition had not improved, the army allowed him to join the theater so that he could entertain the troops. While performing at the theater his relationship with Mannheim ended. In late 1916, he was reexamined by the Army and deemed unfit for service and given a full discharge in January 1917. Veidt then returned to Berlin to pursue his acting career.
From 1916 until his death, he appeared in well over 100 films. He appeared in two of the best-known films of the silent era: as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover and as a disfigured circus performer in The Man Who Laughs (1928). According to the Los Angeles Times, "Conrad Veidt starred in this semi-silent film based on Victor Hugo's novel in which the son of a lord is punished for his father's disrespect to the king by having his face carved into a permanent grin." Veidt also starred in other classic silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac in 1924 (again directed by Robert Weine), The Student of Prague in 1926 and Waxworks in 1924 where he played Ivan the Terrible.
Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering gay rights film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), and in Das Land ohne Frauen (1929), Germany's first talking picture.
He moved to Hollywood and made a few films in the twenties but the advent of talking pictures and his broken English made him return to Germany.
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