Egon Brecher

Brecher was born on 18 February 1880 in Olomouc, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic). The son of a professor, Brecher began studying philosophy in 1900 at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He did not finish his studies, deciding instead to become an actor.

He appeared on several provincial stages in Germany and Austria until 1910, and then played in Vienna on various occasions, directed by Josef Jarno until 1921.

In 1907, he founded an initiative (which lasted for one or two years) to play modern Yiddish theatre in German language with Siegfried Schmitz and members of the student club ‘Theodor Herzl’ like Hugo Zuckermann and Oskar Rosenfeld. In 1919 he was a co-founder, along with Isaak Deutsch, Jacob Mestel, and others, of the Freie Jüdische Volksbühne in Vienna, a Yiddish theatre, which existed until 1922.^[1]

In 1906 and 1911, he visited New York to act in plays in that city's robust Yiddish Theatre. In 1921, he moved to New York to act on Broadway.^{[citation needed]} In the latter half of the 1920s, he was stage director and leading man for the theatrical troupe headed by Eva Le Gallienne.^[2] He moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s to appear in foreign-language versions of American films. In the mid-1930s he appeared in classic horror films The Black Cat, Werewolf of London, The Black Room, Mark of the Vampire and The Devil-Doll, and worked steadily in the espionage films of the 1930s and 1940s, his Slavic accent landing him roles both noble and villainous. One of his largest screen roles was in 1946's So Dark the Night.

Brecher died on 12 August 1946, aged 66, of a heart attack in Hollywood, California. He is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.^[3]

• Brigitte Dalinger: Verloschene Sterne. Geschichte des jüdischen Theaters in Wien. (History of Jewish theatre in Vienna) Picus Verlag, Wien 1998, pp. 65, 198