Brigitte Helm

Brigitte Helm was a German actress who rose to fame for her dual role as Maria and her double named Futura in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent film Metropolis. She was born in Berlin on March 17, 1908, as Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm, the daughter of a bank clerk and a housewife. She took an interest in acting as a child and by age 12 was taking the lead in school plays. She was discovered by Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who cast her in Metropolis after seeing her photo at a casting agency. Helm signed a ten-year contract with UFA, the leading German film studio at the time, and starred in more than 30 films, both silent and sound, before retiring in 1935. Some of her notable films include The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927), Alraune (1928 and 1930), L'Argent (1928), Gloria (1931), The Blue Danube (1932), L'Atlantide (1932), and Gold (1934). She was considered for the title role in Bride of Frankenstein before Elsa Lanchester was given the role. Helm was involved in several traffic accidents and was briefly imprisoned. According to Otto Dietrich, the press chief of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler saw that manslaughter charges against her from an automobile accident were dropped. Helm married her second husband, Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist, after her film contract expired in 1935. She stated that she retired from films because she was disgusted with the Nazi takeover of the film industry. In 1935, she moved to Switzerland, where she had four children with Kunheim. In her later years, she refused to grant any interviews concerning her film career. She died of heart failure on June 11, 1996, in Ascona, Switzerland.