Siegfried Breuer

Debonair Viennese thespian Siegfried Breuer specialized in portraying elegant, charming rogues and profligates. The son of a Wagnerian singer, he was trained from 1924 as an actor at Vienna's Academy for Music and the Performing Arts, studying alongside Paula Wessely and Käthe Gold. He performed on the stage in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt in 'The Prince of Homburg', his first leading role. In 1935, he became a member of the ensemble cast of the Deutsches Theater. From the late 1930's, Breuer was increasingly in demand for movie roles and began to develop his particular style of suave, but shifty, bon vivant. He gave his best performance in Gustav Ucicky's classic The Stationmaster (1940), as Minskij, and in Helmut Käutner's Romance in a Minor Key (1943). He was occasionally seen in operatic parts which required that special Viennese charm, as in Immortal Waltz (1939) and the remake of Die Fledermaus (1946). Carol Reed cast him (for added continental flavour) alongside