The Very First Academy Awards Ceremony
Only two Germans have ever won an Academy Award for Best Actor or Actress in a Leading Role. One of them did so at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Since then many other German-speakers have also won or been nominated for an Oscar.

In modern times the annual Academy Awards extravaganza is seen by millions of viewers on television. (You didn’t miss the Will Smith debacle in 2022, did you?) But the very first Academy Awards event in 1929 was not even broadcast on the radio (there was no television), and the ceremony lasted all of 15 minutes. There are many other things that made the first event unique and unusual compared to today’s Oscars. For one thing the statuette was not yet called an “Oscar” and, for another, the names of the winners were released by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) three months before the event took place in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. Only 270 people paid the $5 for a ticket to attend the event (almost $80 adjusted for inflation).

The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles. On 16 May 1929, the German actor Emil Jannings was not present when his award for Best Actor was announced. He had already returned to Germany. PHOTO: AMPAS

Emil Jannings (1884-1950)
The first ever Academy Award for Best Actor was awarded to a German actor – who was not even at the Roosevelt Hotel to accept it. Emil Jannings had already collected his Academy statuette months before the ceremonies took place on the night of 16 May 1929. At the time of the event in Hollywood Herr Jannings was already back Germany with his “Oscar” in hand, having made six Hollywood films. The 1929 Academy Awards event distributed awards for films made in 1927 and 1928. Jannings had won his Best Actor award for two silent films: The Way of All Flesh (1927, a “lost” film) and The Last Command (1928). There were only 12 categories of awards, compared to many more today. Although sound films were already being made in Hollywood by 1929, the Academy felt it was unfair to have the new talkies compete against silent films. As a result, Warner Brothers’ talkie The Jazz Singer received a “Special Award.” Wings received the award called “Outstanding Picture,” which later became “Best Picture.”

German actor Emil Jannings pictured with his Academy Award statuette in 1929. Jannings’ Oscar statuette is now in the collection of the Deutsche Kinemathek film museum in Berlin. PHOTO: Rex/Independent

With the advent of sound pictures, Jannings’ thick German accent and pompous acting style meant he had no future in Hollywood. He had been born Theodor Friedrich Emil Janenz in Rorschach, Switzerland on 23 July 1884. His mother was German, his father American. He grew up as a German citizen in Switzerland and in Germany (Görlitz and Leipzig). His acting career began on the stage before he made his first motion picture in Berlin in 1914, a war propaganda film titled Im Schützengraben (“in the trench”). His first starring role (as a painter named Paul Werner) was in Im Angesicht des Toten (1916), but he was not happy in silent pictures, since he could not use what he felt was his powerful voice and wide range. However, he was making good money, and by 1919 he had become an internationally famous actor in the golden age of the silent film era.

Back in Germany, after leaving Hollywood, Jannings worked with a young Marlene Dietrich in an early German sound picture (filmed in German and English) that would later become a classic. Der blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (1930) starred Jannings as a university professor, but Dietrich, as the showgirl Lola Lola, stole the picture. Jannings was not happy about that. Later Dietrich was quoted in Life magazine, saying Jannings was “a great actor but a man of childlike vanity, [who] resented her prominence in the picture to the point of fury, acting out a strangling scene with a zeal that left her black and blue for days afterward.” Jannings later willingly cooperated with the Nazi regime and appeared in Nazi cinematic productions. (Dietrich loathed Jannings for remaining in Nazi Germany before and during the war, and later referred to her former co-star as a “ham.”) After the war, Jannings moved to Austria and became an Austrian citizen in 1947, but his film career was over. He was only 65 when he died of liver cancer in 1950. His grave is in St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut on the shore of Lake Wolfgang (Wolfgangsee). Despite his Nazi ties, Jannings received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (at 1630 Vine Street) in February 1960 for the Walk of Fame’s inauguration.

Luise Rainer (1910-2014)
Another eight years would pass before another German, this time a woman, received an Oscar for her acting in a leading role in 1937. Düsseldorf-born Luise Rainer won the Best Actress award for The Great Ziegfeld (1936), the first German woman to do so. Not expecting to win, Rainer did not attend the ceremonies held at the Biltmore Bowl of the Biltmore Hotel, and MGM’s Louis B. Mayer had to send someone to her home to bring her to the awards. Rainer also received the New York Film Critics’ Award for her Ziegfeld role. Because of the Nazi regime in Germany at the time, for the 1937 ceremonies Rainer was labeled “Austrian” rather than German – a bit ironic, considering that Hitler himself was Austrian. But she had appeared on stage with Max Reinhardt’s Vienna theater ensemble in Austria.

Rainer was not the only German-speaking actor to receive an Academy Award in 1937. The Jewish Austro-Hungarian actor Paul Muni (Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, 1895-1967) also won Best Actor for his role as Louis Pasteur in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). It was Muni’s only Oscar for the 22 Hollywood films he made, many of them biopics like the Pasteur one, but he also acted on Broadway.

Luise Rainer in a 1930s publicity portrait. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Muni next co-starred with Luise Rainer in The Good Earth. At a time when Asian roles in Hollywood were played by white, non-Asian actors, Muni and Rainer played Chinese characters in the film version of Pearl Buck’s novel. Muni played a Chinese peasant. The role of his young Chinese bride was filled by Rainer. She won her second Best Actress Oscar (still not called “Oscar” at the time), a rare back-to-back win. In fact, she later called this her “Oscar curse,” the worst thing that could have happened to her career.

Rainer and Muni both independently became disenchanted with Hollywood. Both actors soon left Tinseltown, although Muni made a few films in the 1940s. Rainer made her final film appearance for MGM in 1938 and turned her back on Hollywood. She went to Europe and appeared on the stage in London and New York. She made only two more motion pictures in the US, with small roles in Hostages (1943) and The Gambler (1997). She also did some television work in the US. In September 2011, 101-year-old Rainer travelled to Berlin to receive a star on the Boulevard der Stars, but only after first being left out of the 21 stars awarded in 2011. Rainer died of pneumonia at her home in London on 30 December 2014 at the age of 104. Like Jannings, she was also among the first actors to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (6302 Hollywood Boulevard) at its debut in 1960.

Unlike Jannings, Luise Rainer had absolutely no sympathy for the Nazis, and her life not only ran much longer than his, but also reflected far more evidence of a moral compass and a less confrontational nature. Rainer was a strong woman who accomplished a lot in her long life, including TV productions in the US, Austria, and Germany, but she was also well liked and admired. She was known for her efforts to help Jewish refugees during World War II. To this day, Rainer is still the only German to ever win an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her hometown honored her posthumously in 2017 with a street named for her in the Flingern district of Düsseldorf.

More Oscars Won by German-Speakers
The Austrian cameraman, Karl Freund (1890-1969), also won an Oscar for The Good Earth, for Best Cinematography. Freund is also known for his camera work for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Dracula (1931), Key Largo (1948), and television’s I Love Lucy (1951-1957). He began his film career in Vienna with Sascha-Film, and later worked in Berlin (Potsdam-Neubabelsberg). Since 2012 Freund also has had a star on Berlin’s Boulevard der Stars.

Maximilian Schell
The Swiss German actor Maximilian Schell (1930-2014) was the first German-speaking actor since Emil Jannings to win the Best Actor Oscar. Schell won his Academy Award in 1962 for his role as a defense attorney for Nazi war criminals in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), beating out his American co-star Spencer Tracy, who played the presiding judge. Schell won a Golden Globe Award for his performance in Judgment at Nuremberg as well. He also appeared in many other Hollywood and European films, including The Young Lions (1958), Topkapi (1964), Heidi (1968), The Odessa File (1974), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Julia (1977, Oscar and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor nominations), The Black Hole (1979), and Deep Impact (1998).

Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols directed one the most iconic films of all time, The Graduate (1967), winning the Academy Award for Best Director in the process. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and was the highest grossing film of 1967. Born in Berlin on 6 November 1931, Mike Nichols (Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky, 1931-2014) came from an Austrian, German, Russian, Jewish family. His father was born in Vienna to a once wealthy Russian-Jewish family. His mother’s family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were Gustav Landauer, a leading theorist on anarchism, and author Hedwig Lachmann. Through his mother, Nichols was a third cousin twice removed of German physicist Albert Einstein. The entire family escaped separately from Nazi Germany, later reuniting and settling in New York City in April 1939, where Mike’s father changed his name to Paul Nichols. After a comedy phase as part of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Nichols began directing Broadway stage productions. His first cinematic directing effort, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), garnered five Academy Awards and 13 nominations, including Nichols’s first nomination for Best Director.

Oscar Nominations for German-Speakers
Not everyone can win an Academy Award, but there have been many German-speaking actors, actresses, and directors honored over the years by being nominated for an Oscar. A select few in chronological order:

• Marlene Dietrich – Morocco (1930, Best Actress nomination)
• Josef von Sternberg – Morocco (1930, Best Director nomination)
• Albert Bassermann – Foreign Correspondent (1939, Best Supporting Actor nomination)
• Armin Mueller-Stahl – Shine (1996, Best Supporting Actor nomination)
• Michael Fassbender* – 12 Years a Slave (2013, Best Supporting Actor nomination)
• Michael Fassbender – Steve Jobs (2015, Best Actor nomination)
• Kirsten Dunst – The Power of the Dog (2021, Best Supporting Actress nomination)

*Fassbender was born in Heidelberg, Germany on 2 April 1977, to his Northern Irish mother Adele and his German father Josef Fassbender. The family moved to Killarney, Ireland when he was two. He and his sister spent summer holidays in Germany. Fassbender is fluent in German, but he needed to brush up on his spoken German before filming Inglourious Basterds.

Christoph Waltz’s Two Oscar Wins
The Austrian German actor Christoph Waltz (b. 4 October 1956) has won two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor. Born in Vienna to a German father and an Austrian mother, Waltz’s family has a deep background in stage and film acting. Waltz has both Austrian and German citizenship, but considers himself more Austrian than German, having been born and grown up in Vienna. His father, Johannes Waltz, a German set designer, died in 1964 when Christoph was only eight. Waltz indicated a passion for opera as a young man. He pursued an operatic career until realizing that his voice was not strong enough, but he had also studied acting in Vienna and New York.

Christoph Waltz at the 2017 Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale). PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

Waltz began acting on stage and in television productions in the late 1970s. Later also directing, Waltz acted for over two decades in Europe before getting his breakthrough film role in Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds. Oscar-nominated for his part as the charming but ruthless SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa, Waltz won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He later duplicated that achievement at the 2013 Oscar ceremonies for his role as the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz in another Tarantino film: Django Unchained (2012). For both film roles, in addition to his Oscars, Waltz was also honored with a Golden Globe Award and the British BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor.

Waltz was not the only German-speaking actor in Inglourious Basterds. The cast included many others: German American actress Diane Kruger, German actors Daniel Brühl, Rainer Bock, August Diehl, Til Schweiger, and Martin Wuttke (as Hitler), the German Irish actor Michael Fassbender, and last but not least, Dresden-born Hilmar Eichhorn who portrayed Emil Jannings!

– HF