Erich von Stroheim

Erich Oswald Stroheim was born in Vienna, the son of a middle-class Jewish hat merchant. When he emigrated to America around 1909 he shed that biography entirely, adding a "von," a fictitious noble and military past, and the imperious manner of a Habsburg officer. He drifted into films as an extra and assistant to Griffith, and during the First World War made a lucrative sideline of playing sneering, spike-helmeted Prussian villains — the persona that earned him his billing, "the man you love to hate."

Given the chance to direct, he revealed an obsessive realist's genius. Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922) dissected the cruelty and hypocrisy beneath European elegance with a cynicism new to American screens — and with budgets and schedules that appalled the studios. His masterwork, Greed (1924), was a savagely faithful adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, shot on real San Francisco locations and in Death Valley heat, that ran to some nine hours before MGM hacked it down to roughly two and destroyed the excised footage. The full film is one of cinema's great lost objects.

His perfectionism was uncontrollable. The Merry Widow (1925) succeeded, but The Wedding March (1928) was cut down and split apart, and Gloria Swanson and Joseph Kennedy shut down the scandalous Queen Kelly (1929) mid-production. By the sound era no studio would let him direct; the legend of the profligate genius had made him unemployable. He reinvented himself again — as an actor, giving indelible performances as the humane prison-camp commandant in Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937) and, unforgettably, as Max, the fallen director turned butler to his former star, in Sunset Boulevard (1950). He died in France in 1957, honored abroad as the martyr-artist Hollywood had broken.