Friedrich Gustav Maximilian Schreck (September 6, 1879 – February 20, 1936; aged 56), known professionally as Max Schreck, was a German actor. He is best known for his role as Count Orlok in the 1922 horror film Nosferatu.
Biography
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 The Mayor of Zalamea, adapted from a six-act play, for Decla Bioscop. In 1921, he was hired by Prana Film for its first and only production, Nosferatu (1922), an unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. The company declared itself bankrupt after the film was released to avoid paying copyright infringement costs to the author's widow, Florence Stoker. Schreck portrayed Count Orlok, a character analogous to Count Dracula.
While still in Munich, Schreck appeared in a 16-minute (one-reeler) slapstick, "surreal comedy" written by Bertolt Brecht with cabaret and stage actors Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt, Erwin Faber, and Blandine Ebinger, entitled Mysterien eines Friseursalons (Mysteries of a Barbershop, 1923), directed by Erich Engel. Schreck appeared as a blind man in the film The Street (also 1923).
Schreck's second collaboration with Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau was the comedy Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (The Grand Duke's Finances, 1924). 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 1936, when he died from heart failure.
Further history
Since neither Florence Stoker, who died the year after Schreck, nor any of her descendants ever attempted to claim royalties from Nosferatu, it has been treated as public domain in practice in the United States.[1] The silent feature would be one of Schreck's most famous roles.
About 65 years after Schreck's passing, Jay Lender, a writer for SpongeBob SquarePants in its first three seasons, had the idea to feature Count Orlok in the episode "Graveyard Shift." The gag has been described by Eric Coleman, who was a production executive of the series at that time, as "funny, but it was just so weird and out of left field." Lender searched in books and the internet for usable stills of Schreck playing Orlok from Nosferatu. Though he has never specified his exact source, he found two such stills. One of these depicts Orlok in the doorway, manipulated so that he is moving his left arm up and down, repeatedly turning an oversized light switch off and on. The second still shows him looking over his shoulder, shown first more or less unchanged, and then impishly grinning, a modification made by Nick Jennings.[2] However, the still of Nosferatu grinning in the final episode was manipulated from a different still that was intended in the storyboard, which presents Orlok in a crouching position.
References
External links
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