Max Schreck
Friedrich Gustav Max Schreck (6 September 1879 – 20 February 1936) was a German actor. He is most often remembered today for his lead role in the film Nosferatu (1922).
Max Schreck was born in Berlin-Friedenau, on 6 September 1879. His father saw the ever-growing enthusiasm for theatre and did not approve. His mother provided him with money, which he used to secretly take acting lessons. Only after the death of his father did he attend drama school. After graduating, he travelled across the country with Demetrius Schrutz for a short time.
Schreck received his training at the Berliner Staatstheater (the State Theatre of Berlin) which he completed in 1902. He made his stage début in Meseritz and Spever, and then toured Germany for two years. Schreck then joined Max Reinhardt’s company of performers in Berlin. Shreck was then in the German military in World War I.
For three years between 1919 and 1922, Schreck appeared at the Munich Kammerspiele, including a role in the expressionist production of Bertolt Brecht’s début, Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) (in which he played the “freakshow landlord” Glubb). During this time he also worked on his first film Der Richter von Zalamea, adapted from a six act play, for Decla Bioscop.
In 1921, he was hired by Prana Film for their first and only production, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu), (1922). The German Expressionist horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starred Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. The film, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, “vampire” became “Nosferatu” and “Count Dracula” became “Count Orlok”).
This was the only Prana Film; the company declared bankruptcy after Bram Stoker’s estate, acting for his widow, Florence Stoker, sued for copyright infringement and won. The court ordered all existing prints of Nosferatu burned, but one purported copy of the film had already been distributed around the world. These prints were duplicated over the years.
In 1923, while still in Munich, Schreck appeared in a 16-minute (one-reeler) slapstick, “surreal comedy” written by Bertolt Brecht, entitled Mysterien eines Friseursalons (Mysteries of a Barbershop), directed by Erich Engel. Also in 1923, Schreck appeared as a blind man in the film Die Straße (The Street).
Schreck’s second collaboration with Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau was the 1924 comedy Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (The Grand Duke’s Finances). Even Murnau did not hesitate to declare his contempt for the picture.
In 1926, Schreck returned to the Kammerspiele in Munich and continued to act in films surviving the advent of sound until his death in 1936. On 19 February 1936, Schreck had just played The Grand Inquisitor in the play Don Carlos, that evening he felt unwell and the doctor sent him to the hospital where he died early the next morning of a heart attack. He was buried on the fourteenth of March, 1936 at Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof in Berlin.
The person and performance of Max Schreck in Nosferatu has been fictionalized by actor Willem Dafoe in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire. In a sort of secret history, Shadow posits that Schreck actually was a vampire. Werner Herzog’s 1979 homage to Nosferatu, Nosferatu the Vampyre starred Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula, not Orlok
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