Brigitte Helm


Brigitte Helm was a German actress, best remembered for her dual role as Maria and her double the Maschinenmensch in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis.

Career

Born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm in Berlin, Helm's first role was that of Maria in Metropolis which she began work on while only 18 years old. After Metropolis, Helm made over 30 other films, including talking pictures, before retiring in 1935. Her other appearances include The Love of Jeanne Ney, Alraune, L'Argent, Gloria, The Blue Danube, L'Atlantide, and Gold. Helm was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein before Elsa Lanchester was given the role.
Though having a 10-year contract with UFA expiring in 1935, Helm incurred the wrath of Nazi Germany for "race defilement" in marrying her second husband Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist of Jewish background. Helm was also involved in several traffic accidents, and was briefly imprisoned. According to Otto Dietrich's book The Hitler I Knew, Adolf Hitler saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped.
Helm retired from films because she was "disgusted with the Nazi takeover of the film industry". In 1935, she moved to Switzerland where she later had four children with von Kunheim. In her later years, she refused to grant any interviews concerning her film career.

Selected filmography