Helm, Brigitte (1908–1996)

German actress who starred in the cult classic Metropolis. Born Eva Gisela Schittenhelm (also seen as Gisele Eve Schittenhelm) in Berlin, Germany, on March 17, 1908 (some sources cite 1906); died in Anscona, Switzerland, on June 11, 1996; married Hugh Kunheim (an industrialist).

Filmography:

Metropolis (1926); Am Rande der Welt (At the Edge of the World, 1926); Der Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Loves of Jeanne Ney, 1927); Alraune (Unholy Love, 1928); L'Argent (Fr., 1928); Abwege (1928); Crisis (1928); Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (The Wonderful Lies of Nina Petrovna, 1929); Manolescu (1929); Die singende Stadt (1930); The City of Song (UK version of Die singende Stadt, 1931); Gloria (German and French versions, 1931); Im Geheimdienst (1931); The Blue Danube (UK, 1932); Die Herrin von Atlantis (L'Atlantide, 1932); Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Cristo, 1932); Inge und die Millionen (1933); Der Läufer von Marathon (1933); Spione am Werk (1933); Die Insel (1934); Gold (1934); Ein idealer Gatte (1935); Gilgi Eine von Uns (1937).

Tall, blonde and beautiful, Brigitte Helm starred in over 35 movies during the Germany film industry's golden age. She was born Eva Gisela Schittenhelm in 1908, the daughter of a Prussian army officer who died when she was an infant. A serious student, Helm acted in school plays while attending boarding school, but the movie industry did not remotely interest her. It was frowned upon by the Prussians as an immoral profession.

Even so, Helm's mother sent her daughter's photograph to Thea von Harbou , the screenwriter and wife of director Fritz Lang, and the 16-year-old Helm was tricked into doing a screen test. As a result, the teenager was given the lead in Lang's expressionistic masterpiece Metropolis, an allegory of totalitarianism written by von Harbou, which was shot in 1924–25 and released in 1926. Helm worked every day for 18 months playing the role of Maria, an oppressed, idealistic working girl in a futuristic city who sparks the social conscience of her fellow workers but convinces them to enlist a mediator for their grievances rather than resort to violence. At the urging of the Master of Metropolis, however, Maria is transformed into the "false Maria," a robot in her likeness, by the mad scientist Rotwang. As a doppelganger (divided self), she is evil incarnate, fomenting a workers' rebellion as part of the Master's plan so that he might replace them with robots. The ambitious movie is famous for its flying machines and special effects. Helm, who had to hang upside down or stand in water to her waist for hours on end, hated the experience. "After one torturous ordeal," reports The New York Times News Service, "when she wondered why a double could not have taken her place during the nine days it took to shoot a scene in which she was encased in a metallic robot shell, her face obscured, Lang haughtily claimed an auteur's creative sensibility." Metropolis was Hitler's favorite film, for all the wrong reasons.

With the film's release, Helm became an international star. She appeared in two important early films directed by Austrian-born G.W. Pabst, master of the new realism. Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney, concerning love and the Russian Revolution, contains an innovative, two-minute section in which Pabst uses 40 cuts between three separate characters in a heated argument. The other, Crisis (1928), is a look into the sexual experience of a woman.

In 1929, the sought after but reluctant Helm turned down Josef von Sternberg's offer to star in the Blue Angel, a part that went to Marlene Dietrich . After nine years in front of the camera, appearing in many German films and some British and French, Helm retired from the screen and married. She lived in seclusion for over 30 years before she died in Anscona, Switzerland, in 1996.