Life and Career
Lubitsch was born in Berlin, the son of Anna (née Lindenstaedt) and Simon Lubitsch (Russian: Любич), a tailor. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish, his father born in Grodno and his mother from Wriezen-on-the-Oder, outside Berlin. He turned his back on his father's tailoring business to enter the theater, and by 1911, he was a member of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater. He made his film debut the following year as an actor, but he gradually abandoned acting to concentrate on directing. He appeared in approximately thirty films as an actor between 1912 and 1920. His last film appearance as an actor was in the 1920 drama Sumurun, opposite Pola Negri and Paul Wegener, in which he also directed.
Read more about this topic: Ernst Lubitsch
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:
“If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 14:30.
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)