Alexander Granach (1890–1945)

Alexander Granach was born Schaje Granoch to a Jewish family in the small town of Werbowitz, Austrian Galicia (present-day Verbivtsi, Ukraine). He learned to speak Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian. In 1906, he went to Berlin, Germany and rose to prominence as an actor at the Volksbühne theater. He began working in silent films in 1922, when he became famous for his role as Knock in Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau's loose adaptation of Dracula. He went on to co-star in such major early German talkies as Kameradschaft (1931). He married Martha Guttmann, with whom he had a son before they divorced. Following the rise of the Nazi regime to power, Granach went to the Soviet Union to work. After being arrested on suspicions of being a German spy in 1937, and released when Lion Feuchtwanger intervened with Josef Stalin, Granach got to Switzerland and then to the USA. Although he spoke no English when he arrived, he quickly secured good roles in major Hollywood movies. He made his first American film appearance as Kopalski in Ninotchka (1939), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Granach proved indispensable to filmmakers during the years of World War II, effectively portraying both Nazis and anti-Nazis in So Ends Our Night (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Hitler Gang (1944) and others. His last film role was in The Seventh Cross (1944), in which almost the entire supporting cast was made up of prominent European refugees. He was also successful on the Broadway stage, performing in an adaptation of A Bell for Adano in 1944. Granach published an autobiography, There Goes an Actor, around the time of his death at age 54 in 1945. It was republished in 2010 under a new title, From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor. He was the subject of a 2012 German television documentary called Alexander Granach. His son Gad Granach, who had fled to Israel in 1936, wrote his own memoirs with many references to his father.