Dagover, Lil (1897–1980)

German actress who was a major star of stage and screen for over 50 years and made over 100 films. Born Marta Maria Lillits Seubert (some sources give her name as Marie Antonia Sieglinde Marta Seubert), on September 30, 1897, in Madioen, Java, Netherlands East Indies; died in Munich, Germany, on January 30, 1980; daughter of Adolf Seubert and Marta (Herf) Seubert; married Fritz Daghofer, in 1914 (divorced 1919); married Georg Witt.

Born to German parents on the island of Java where her father was a forestry expert employed by the government of the Netherlands East Indies, Marta Maria Lillits Seubert was taken to Germany at the age of six. Orphaned by the death of both parents when she was 13, she was raised by family members in various German cities. Marta Maria matured into a young woman of astonishing beauty during the next few years. She began to study acting while at boarding school in Weimar and, at age 17, married the actor Fritz Daghofer, a man 35 years her senior. Though the marriage ended in 1919, it was through Daghofer that she met leaders of a German film industry that was going through changes as revolutionary as those that were convulsing the nation's political landscape. Having changed her name to Lil Dagover, the neophyte actress appeared in two films in 1919: Fritz Lang's Harakiri (Butterfly) and Robert Wiene's pathbreaking expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which she appeared in the small role of Jane.

Dagover's brief film appearances alerted the public to the emergence of a new star, a woman of considerable dramatic talent and beauty. In the 1920s, she starred in Lang's Der müde Tod (Destiny, 1921), as well as in a number of well received films directed by the brilliant F.W. Murnau, including Phantom (1922) and Chronik von Grieshuus (At the Grey House, 1925). She also co-starred in 1925 with Emil Jannings in Tartuffe. In 1925, Dagover's talent and stunning looks brought her to the attention of Germany's leading theater impresario Max Reinhardt, who invited her to represent "Beauty" at his recently founded festival in Salzburg, Austria, in the Calderon-von Hofmannsthal play The Great Theater of the World. Reinhardt chose well, and Dagover personified Beauty for thousands of fascinated playgoers at the Salzburg Festival for the next six years.

During the last years of the silent film era, Lil Dagover was a star not only in Germany and Austria but in Sweden and France. She appeared in several Swedish films, including Gustav Molander's Hans engelska Fru (Discord, 1928). In France, she starred in Julien Duvivier's Le Tourbillon de Paris (The Whirlwind of Paris, 1928) as well as in La Grande Passion (1929) and Monte Cristo (1929), an unusually long film that was presented in two parts. As Dagover matured in years, her screen image became well defined: she was the handsome woman who was no longer young and accepted the fact that she would have to compete with younger women who sometimes proved alluring to men simply because of their youth and physical perfection. In two films released in 1932, Die letzte Illusion (The Last Illusion) and Das Abenteuer der Thea Roland (The Adventures of Thea Roland), Dagover embodied the dilemmas of an older woman in love with a younger man. In The Last Illusion, she superbly portrayed a woman of 40 who loses her chance at love when the younger man she is infatuated with is seduced by her own daughter. Another fine performance was given in The Adventures of Thea Roland, a role in which Dagover was willing to show how a woman confronts her own fading beauty, made all the more touching because of dark circles under her eyes and facial lines that could no longer be concealed by makeup.

By 1931, Lil Dagover had become an international film star. That year, Warner Bros. invited her to Hollywood for the lead in The Woman from Monte Carlo. The film, which premiered in Indianapolis in America's heartland, was a success, depicting as it did an actress who was considerably more animated and sparkling than she had been in some of her European productions. Well read, fluent in five languages, with a pleasant voice, Dagover had no problems making the transition from silent to sound films, and she was ready to continue her career as the 1930s began. In 1931, she made a brief but memorable appearance in Erik Charell's extravaganza Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances). In the early years of the Nazi regime, she avoided appearing in propaganda films, starring instead in such clever comedies as Ich heirate meine Frau (I'm Marrying My Wife, 1934) and a German version of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, which was released in 1935. In 1935, she also appeared in Der höhere Befehl (The Higher Command), set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, in which she played a French actress and spy. Dagover revealed previously untapped depths in Schlussakkord (Closing Chord, 1936), portraying a mother desperately searching for her lost son.

In her 1937 starring role in Die Kreuzersonate (The Kreuzer Sonata), adapted from the short story by Leo Tolstoy, Dagover gave an excellent performance as Yelena, a woman destroyed for breaking society's moral code by slipping into an adulterous relationship. As an upholder of middle-class morality, the Nazi regime encouraged and subsidized art that made a case for traditional virtues. Even though he was himself a notorious philanderer, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels praised The Kreuzer Sonata and Dagover's performance in it,

seeing to it that she was rewarded with the coveted title of Staatsschauspielerin ("State Actress"). At age 40, Dagover was at the pinnacle of her fame and from this point on increasingly began to take character parts. During the war years, she appeared in supporting roles in many so-called Kostümfilme—extravaganzas based on heroic periods in German history as seen through the distorting lens of Nazi ideology. She appeared in the 1943 propaganda film Wien 1910 (Vienna 1910), which glorified the career of anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger. For her work in entertaining German troops, she received a War Service Cross in 1944.

Given the fact that she had remained relatively untainted by Nazism, Lil Dagover was able to resume her acting career soon after 1945. Not all of the films she appeared in were distinguished, but in several instances she displayed the star qualities that her fans of the 1920s and 1930s remembered. These performances included her roles in Königliche Hoheit (Royal Highness, 1953), Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (The Confessions of Felix Krull, 1957), and Alfred Weidemann's television dramatization of Buddenbrooks (1957); all productions were based on writings of Thomas Mann. After a long absence, Dagover returned to the stage in the 1950s, receiving rave reviews for her leading roles in Colette 's Gigi and Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot. The range of her interests extended from the classic German plays of Heinrich von Kleist to the plays of Anton Chekhov and Tennessee Williams.

The last phase of Lil Dagover's career was rich in achievements. In 1967, she was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite her venerable age, she gave some of the most distinguished performances of her career in a number of carefully chosen roles in such films as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Karl May (1961), as well as in Maximilian Schell's Der Fussgänger (The Pedestrian, 1974), Der Richter und sein Henker (The Judge and His Hangman, 1975) and Geschichten aus den Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Woods, 1979). Lil Dagover died in Munich on January 30, 1980.

sources:

Aros. Lil Dagover: Der Werdegang einer schönen Frau. Berlin: Verlag August Scherl, 1932.

Dagover, Lil. Ich war die Dame: Erinnerungen. Munich: Schneekluth Verlag, 1979.

Kreimeier, Klaus. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918–1945. Translated by Robert and Rita Kimber. NY: Hill and Wang, 1996.

"Lil Dagover," in The Times [London]. February 9, 1980, p. 14.

Romani, Cinzia. Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich. Translated by Robert Connolly. NY: Sarpedon Publishers, 1992.

John Haag , Athens, Georgia