Emil Jannings (23 July 1884 – 2 January 1950) was a Swiss-born German actor. He was not only the first actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, but the first person to be presented an Oscar.
He was christened as Theodor Friedrich Emil Janenz in Rorschach, Switzerland, the son of a German mother and an American father.
Jannings was a theater actor who went into films. He starred in F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924), as a ...
more
Emil Jannings (23 July 1884 – 2 January 1950) was a Swiss-born German actor. He was not only the first actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, but the first person to be presented an Oscar.
He was christened as Theodor Friedrich Emil Janenz in Rorschach, Switzerland, the son of a German mother and an American father.
Jannings was a theater actor who went into films. He starred in F. W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann, 1924), as a proud but aged hotel doorman who is demoted to a restroom attendant, and in the 1922 film version of Othello. Jannings worked with Murnau on two other films, playing the title character in Herr Tartüff (1925) and Mephistopheles in Faust (1926). He eventually started a career in Hollywood. In 1929 he won the Oscar for two films, The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command.
His Hollywood career came to an end with the advent of talkies; his thick German accent was difficult to understand, and his dialogue was dubbed by another actor in the part...
less
