Casablanca and Its Real Refugees

The film for which the German actor Conrad “Conny” Veidt is best known in the English-speaking world has been described as a series of fortunate accidents. There is some truth to that claim, but one of the best beneficial “accidents” related to Casablanca is the many genuine war refugees playing refugees in that film. Among many others, that accident helped turn Casablanca into the film classic it is considered today.

The classic CASABLANCA movie poster with the top credited actors, including Conrad Veidt. He is pictured in the upper right corner as Major Strasser. PHOTO: Warner Bros.

“If you think of…all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn’t have had anything like the color and tone it had.”
– Film critic Pauline Kael

Of the film’s international cast, only three of the credited actors were born in the United States: Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson (as Sam, the Black piano player), and Joy Page (as Annina Brandel, a young Bulgarian refugee). The imported talent worked both in front of and behind the camera. That accident of history came about because of the Nazi war that the cinematic Casablanca was created around. Conrad Veidt was just one of many European refugees who ended up in Hollywood around 1940 looking for film work in the last place where such work was open to them. Like Veidt, not all of those refugees were Jewish. (His wife was.) But for all of them their acting careers had gone over a cliff.

Few of these film industry refugees could hope to have even the limited success that Veidt enjoyed in Southern California. Many survived by driving taxis, working in restaurants, or taking jobs left vacant by Blacks who had gone to work in factories for the war effort. Vienna-born Joe May (1880-1954), a highly successful film director and producer in Germany, had difficulties in Hollywood. After directing a few B movies, he and his wife Mia opened the Blue Danube Restaurant in Los Angeles. (Joe, whose real name was Joseph Otto Mandl, had adopted his wife’s stage name. Mia had been born Hermine Pfleger.) But in the end, even that culinary venture was a financial failure.

The German actor Curt Bois (center) played a pickpocket in CASABLANCA. He warns the couple played by Gerald Oliver Smith and Norma Varden that there are “vultures, vultures everywhere” as he steals the man’s wallet. Berlin native Bois (1901-1991) began acting at the age of eight. He made his last film appearance in 1987 in Wim Wenders’ WINGS OF DESIRE (1987) as the poet Homer. PHOTO: Warner Bros.

Even Peter Lorre, another Austrian-born film person in Hollywood, had problems making it in the US. Lorre had been a big star in Germany, but Hollywood never really figured out how to showcase his real acting talent – beyond his appearance as the shifty Ugarte, the man Rick (Bogart) despises in Casablanca. Part of the problem, especially for the actors, was language – a problem humorously highlighted in Casablanca in the “What watch? – Ten watch. – Such much!” scene. But thanks to Casablanca, many refugees from Austria, Germany, Hungary, and other counties were able to get a paying role in Hollywood.

The Film
Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theater in New York City on 26 November 1942. It later went into general release on 23 January 1943. Helmed by the studio’s leading director, the Hungarian Michael Curtiz, Casablanca is an American romantic drama film filmed and set during World War II. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre.

Based on the never-produced play Everybody Comes to Rick’s by Murray Bennett and Joan Alison, the film script followed the plot of the play fairly closely. (It should have, since Warner Bros. paid $20,000 for the rights to the play, equivalent to about $370,000 in 2024 dollars.) Almost all of the film’s key elements, such as Sam, the Black piano player and Rick’s friend (at a time when Black actors were usually playing train porters or servants), and Ilsa leaving Rick, came from the play. But the film script was produced by a writing team that involved not less than six screenwriters over time – credited and uncredited. That team polished and improved the action and dialog, even after the production began. The film, as opposed to a stage production, was able to add locations, atmosphere, and story elements not possible on a theatrical stage. Most of the play takes place inside Rick’s Café Américaine. The movie was able to expand and move around more. But the central story and the characters came from the play.

The myth that the film’s ending was not known is nonsense. The ending of Casablanca is the same as in the play, only moved to the airport. The puritanic censorship of the time would have never allowed Rick to take Ilsa away from Victor Laszlo, her husband. (As it was, the censors cut out or altered a lot of the film.) The ending was never in doubt. The only script problem was how to keep the ending from being a downer for audiences. The writers struggled with that until they finally came up with Rick’s “nothing but a hill of beans” speech, showing how a noble Rick was willing to sacrifice his love for Ilsa, and pointing out how much she would regret staying with Rick when all was said and done. The script delays were due to finding the right words for Rick to say, not to deciding who got the girl.

It was the same for the closing scenes, when Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt) gets shot by Rick. As in the play, Strasser gets shot, but how it happens was the question. The cast, the director, and producer Hal Wallis hotly debated this. Shooting the Major in the back was one option, but that clashed with Rick’s character (and the censors), and Bogart did not think that was something his character would do. In the end, the scene was filmed as seen by millions of moviegoers. Strasser shoots first and Rick shoots back in self-defense.

Most movie fans are more familiar with his award-winning music for Gone With the Wind, but the Austrian composer Max Steiner is one of the “invisible stars of Casablanca.” Although he received three Oscars as a film music composer, Steiner’s marvelous score for Casablanca was unjustly ignored for an Academy Award. His music is a key factor in the film’s enduring popularity.

Prelude
Before Conrad Veidt’s arrival in Hollywood in 1940, the German actor had a long and distinguished stage and film acting career behind him. He had also previously acted in Hollywood silent films, shortly before the dawn of “talkies”. His silent era films, made for Universal and United Artists, include The Beloved Rogue (1927, with John Barrymore), The Man Who Laughs (1928), and The Last Performance (Illusion) (1929). The advent of sound sent him back to Germany, but only briefly.

The arrival of the Nazi government in Germany in 1932 would soon force him to leave Germany again, and for good. He would begin a new phase of his film career in England, where he had already made some films, including the now lost People in a Cage (1930) for British International Pictures, Rome Express (1932), and I Was a Spy (1933), both for British Gaumont. Veidt’s last British picture was the only Technicolor movie he ever appeared in: The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Veidt played the distinguished villain Jaffar – and created the prototype that Disney later used as a model for the animated Jafar (one f) in Aladdin (1992). The Thief of Bagdad had to be completed in Hollywood following the outbreak of World War II in September 1939.

Veidt and his wife Lilli soon moved into their new home in the Hampstead district of London, not far from the Denham Film Studios of Alexander Korda. In London Veidt had the company of many of his German film compatriots who had also fled Germany, willingly or otherwise. They formed a German-speaking cinematic artists’ colony in their new English-speaking homeland. Veidt felt very much at home due to his previous work in England in the 1920s and 1930s. He and Lilli had become naturalized British subjects in February 1939. His German accent was not a real handicap, since he could also play other foreign nationalities (Dutch, Danish, etc.). Unlike later in Hollywood, in England Veidt did not have to be limited to German spy or evil Nazi roles. And he was also well known from his silent film days in England. Even after moving to Hollywood, Veidt contributed a portion of his film salary to the British war effort.

The Hollywood Years
Conrad Veidt’s 1940 Hollywood visit was not intended to be a permanent move. He and his wife were happy in England, and his travel to Hollywood from England was intended only to promote his British-made film Contraband (known as Blackout in the US). Conrad and Lilli had sailed to New York City aboard the SS Duchess of Bedford.

Later Veidt found himself more or less trapped in Hollywood, as the United States entered the war after 7 December 1941. He was persuaded by Jack Warner to come out to Hollywood and not return to England. His age and health meant that he would not be able to participate in the fighting war, but he could help in other ways by remaining in the US. Soon after their arrival in Los Angeles, Conrad and Lilli moved into their new American home in Beverly Hills at 617 North Camden Drive.

In Contraband, filmed in England, Veidt had played a non-German hero, as the Danish merchant ship’s Captain Andersen, with costar Valerie Hobson. In Hollywood, Veidt’s accent made him a prime candidate for the growing number of Nazi roles. Wishing to avoid being typecast in this way, Veidt had a clause inserted into his contract to ensure that such roles were to be written as antagonists. Veidt’s first film in Hollywood was Escape (1940), which would be the first of eight pictures that he eventually made in the United States after 1940.

In only one of his eight Hollywood films did Veidt play a good guy. In MGM’s spy thriller Above Suspicion (1943), Veidt had third billing after Joan Crawford and Fred McMurray (as an Oxford professor!), playing an amiable Austrian member of the resistance named Hassert Seidel. And that was only possible because Veidt and Basil Rathbone, friends from their British film days, switched roles before filming! Rathbone became the Nazi German, and Veidt the Austrian hero. Unlike Major Strasser in Casablanca, Veidt’s character, Count Seidel manages to remain alive at the end of Above Suspicion. Ironically, this film, made just after Casablanca, was Conrad Veidt’s last. He died of a heart attack only weeks after filming, and was never able to enjoy the success of his last two films.

The movie poster for ABOVE SUSPICION, the last picture Conrad Veidt appeared in before his death soon after its completion in 1943. PHOTO: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Filming Casablanca
The first day of filming for Casablanca began at the Warners studio in Burbank on a pleasant spring day in 1942. On 25 May the script was still incomplete, and a few of the supporting cast members still had yet to sign a contract, but the Warner Bros. machine was set in gear, no matter what. The studio system was nothing, if not efficient, with carefully timed shooting schedules. Even if there might be a hiccup now and then. But filming began on Stage 12-A on the set of Rick’s Café Américaine, script or no script.

Shooting ended in early August – with an overrun of about a week – filming Bogart and Bergman’s outdoor market scenes, and a few days later with Bergman and Henreid walking together on the black market street, plus a few other scenes, including the Lisbon plane flying overhead – all shot on the lot’s French Street. Except for some brief extra scenes added later in response to preview audience reactions, filming ended on 4 August 1942.

Casablanca was definitely not shot in chronological order. The early scene of Major Strasser’s arrival at the airport, the only sequence shot on location away from the studio, was filmed on a hot summer day (13 July) at Metropolitan Airport in the San Fernando Valley, now known as the Van Nuys Airport. Most of the film’s principal filming was already “in the can” by then. And that was despite wartime conditions. The Japanese threat was palpable in California. Supplies were harder to come by (the studio even had a “save nails” campaign!) and the nation, especially Southern California, was nervous about possible attacks. There were even restrictions on where location shooting could take place.

TRIVIA: The Iron Cross worn by Veidt’s Major Strasser was the real thing, purchased by the Warners prop department at a Los Angeles pawnshop for thirty cents.

Conrad Veidt first joined the cast to begin filming on 6 June 1942. His role as Major Strasser involved fewer days than most of the other principal cast members, but he was paid $25,000, the same as co-stars Paul Henreid and Ingrid Bergman. That made the German-born actor one of the highest paid members of the Casablanca cast. Each of the three stars earned $25,000 for their work in the picture, but Veidt only had to work five weeks (at $5,000 per week) of the total ten weeks of filming. Claude Rains was originally budgeted for $22,000, but he actually earned $28,000 with overtime.

Humphrey Bogart, the only American among the nine top-billed stars, was paid $36,667 for his role as Richard “Rick” Blaine, “an American of indeterminate age”. By then Bogart was a true movie star who was earning a top-dollar salary. (Adjusting for inflation, in 1942 he earned the 2024 equivalent of about $700,000, still far below the top film stars of today.)

The famous airport scene: Major Heinrich Strasser (Conrad Veidt, left) arrives in Casablanca and is greeted by Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains). It is the only scene in Casablanca shot outside the studio – at the Van Nuys airport. Even the famous foggy departure scene, when Ilsa leaves Rick at the airport, was shot indoors. The outdoor Paris scenes were stock footage done as background projection. PHOTO: Warner Bros.

The Last Surviving Cast Member of Casablanca
Conrad Veidt was the first Casablanca cast member to die. The second was Arthur “Dooley” Wilson, who played Rick’s friend and piano player Sam. Wilson, who was actually a drummer who had to fake his piano playing in the film, retired from show business in 1953. Shortly after, on May 30, Wilson died in Los Angeles at the age of 67.

The last surviving member of the cast was the French actress Madeleine Lebeau (1923-2016), who played Yvonne, Rick’s discarded girlfriend. She was married to Marcel Dalio, who also appeared in Casablanca as Emil the croupier (uncredited). Dalio was Jewish, and the couple had undertaken a real life refugee escape from Paris via Lisbon similar to that of the fictional refugees in the film. Dalio filed for divorce while his wife was filming Casablanca. Lebeau is noted for the famous film scene in which she sheds genuine tears and shouts “Vive La France!” during the singing duel in Rick’s Café – when those singing La Marseillaise drown out the anthem sung by German soldiers. She made a few more US films before returning to her native France, where she acted in some 20 films. Madeleine Lebeau died in Estepona, Spain on 1 May 2016, at the age of 92.

For a full biography of Veidt, click on the “More” link below. The most recent Veidt biography in print is an English translation of the German original Dämon der Leinwand: Conrad Veidt, Demon of the Silver Screen: His Life and Works in Context by Sabine Schwientek (Jun 16, 2023) – from Amazon.com – Kindle: $29.99 – Paperback: $43.12

More | Conrad Veidt – Full Bio

Related Pages
AT THE GERMAN WAY

• The Urn Chronicles – Conrad Veidt’s Exile in Death: Why did Veidt’s ashes end up in London rather than Berlin?
• Also see Germans in Hollywood – German, Austrian and Swiss people in Hollywood
• Mini Bios A-Z – More brief biographies of people from the German-speaking world
• Featured Biographies – More detailed bios of notable people from the German-speaking world
• Notable Women from Austria, Germany, Switzerland
• Famous Graves in Germany – Where are they buried?

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