Lilian Harvey was born on January 19th, 1906 in London. Her mother was English and her father was German. When she was eight her family moved to Berlin shortly before the outbreak of WW1. She spent much of the war at school in Switzerland where she broadened her knowledge of languages and classical dance.
After graduating high school in Berlin, she worked in theatre revues before debuting in her first film "Der Fluch" for Robert Land. After many roles in silent films, UFA found great use for her acting, dancing and language skills in many famous light operettas made with the advent of sound. These highly popular films (usually co-starring Willy Fritsch, with whom she became irrevocably associated in the public's mind as the romantic dream-team of the European cinema) were usually made in three different languages at once. The cast would be switched around her for the various takes in German, French and English (Laurence Olivier had his first film role in one of her vehicles).
Her most successful film, 1931's "Der Kongress Tanzt"/"Le congres s'amuse"/"Congress Dances" led to a contract in Hollywood with the Fox Film Company. She dissolved this contract after a few pictures, walking out on a role that was filled by then-unknown Alice Faye and returning to UFA to be with director Paul Martin, with whom she was romantically involved. The Nazi regime had come to power in her absence and Lilian Harvey found it difficult to work under Goebbels.
She was instrumental in helping those persecuted by the Nazis escape until her film popularity waned and she was forced to escape as well. She eventually landed in the USA and spent most of WW2 in Los Angeles working as a volunteer nurse. Her former directors and co-workers like Michael Curtiz and Billy Wilder remained social contacts, but the stigma of having been UFA's biggest star of the early thirties kept her from reigniting her own film career. She did theatre work and continued to work on European stages after the war. She received war reparations in the early sixties and lived on the Riviera until her death on July 27th, 1968.
