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Anton Walbrook, who featured in many P&P films, was a great and duly famous actor in his era.
However, there is much less known about his life than his work. What we have found are mostly basic facts culled from places like Wikipedia, and other sources (see the Biography page). But if you know anything interesting about Anton please tell us.
Either visit the discussion board called 'Unvarnished Anton' or email webmaster@antonwalbrook.co.uk.
Thanks!
Media Files featuring Anton Walbrook
SITE POLICY: We do not want to annoy copyright holders but we do wish to serve Anton fans with clips - so the site policy is that we will post images and audio but not movie files, unless given explicit permission. I hope both parties understand this position.
The Life & Death of Colonel Blimp
Here we have an audio clip (MP3) extracted from Anton's wonderful speech as Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in which he tells a British official "the truth" about himself.
Read the
transcript of the speech (expand/collase link)
The truth about me is that I'm a tired old man who came to this country because he's homesick. Oh please don't stare at me like that, sir, I'm all right in the head.
You know that after the war we had very bad years in Germany. We got poorer and poorer, every day retired officers and schoolteachers were caught shoplifting. Money lost its value, the price of everything rose - except of human beings.
We read in the papers of course that after-war years were bad everywhere. That crime was increasing and that the honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well I needn't tell you sir that, in Germany, the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail.
My wife was English. She would've loved to come back to England. But it seemed to me that I would be letting down my country in its greatest need, and so she stayed at my side. When in summer '33 we found that we had lost our children to the Nazi party, and I was willing to come, she died. None of my sons came to her funeral. Heil Hitler.
And then in January '35 I had to go to Berlin on a mission for my firm. Driving up in my car, I lost my way on the outskirts of the city and suddenly the landscape seemed so familiar to me. And slowly I recognised the road, the lake, and a nursing home where I spent some weeks recovering almost forty years ago. I stopped the car and sat still, remembering.
And. You see in this very nursing home, sir, I met my wife for the first time. And I met an Englishman who became my greatest friend. And I remembered the people at the station in '19 when we prisoners were sent home. Cheering us, treating us like friends. The faces of a party of distinguished men around a table who tried their utmost to comfort me when the defeat of my country seemed to me unbearable.
And, very foolishly, I remembered the English countryside. The gardens, the green lawns, the reedy rivers and the trees she loved so much. And a great desire came over me to come back to my wife's country.
And this, sir, is the truth.
Picture shows Anton saying "Heil Hitler" (N.B. With bitter
irony, not praise). Click for larger verison.
NOTE: In an article by James Chapman, "'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' reconsidered.", Powell is quoted as saying "The part of Theo was written by us for Anton Walbrook".
49th Parallel
And here, his other great seated oration from 49th Parallel as Peter the Hutterite, preceded by the shouting of Eric Portman's Hirsch The Nazi.
Hear Anton's speech from 49th Parallel (MP3).
Read the
transcript of the speech (expand/collase link)
I don't ask where you come from or what brought you here. Although you've left us in no doubt as to your beliefs. Someone has given you, no doubt deliberately, a completely false impression of us.
We are only one amongst many foreign settlements in Canada. There are thousands of them in this part of the world. And they've been founded some recently, some eighty years ago, by people who left their homes in Europe because of famine, because of starvation, because of racial and political persecution and some, like ourselves, because of their faith.
Some came only to find new land, new boundaries and new worlds. But all have found - here in Canada - security, peace and tolerance and understanding which - in Europe - it is your Fuhrer's pride to have stamped out.
You call us Germans. You call us brothers. Yes, most of us are Germans. Our names are German, our tongue is German, our old hand-written books are in German script. But we are not your brothers.
Our Germany is dead. However hard this may be for some of us older people, it's a blessing for our children. Our children grow up against new backgrounds, new horizons.
And they are free! Free to grow up as children. Free to run and to laugh, without being forced into uniforms. Without being forced to march up and down the street singing battle songs!
You talk about a new order in Europe. The new order. Where there will not be one corner, not a hole big enough for a mouse, where a decent man can breathe freely.
You think we hate you, but we don't. It is against our faith to hate. We only hate the power of evil which is spreading over the world. You and your Hitlerism are like the microbes of some filthy disease filled with the longing to multiply yourselves until you destroy everything healthy in the world.
No, we are not your brothers.
Screenshots from the great "forced to march up and down the street singing BATTLESONGS!" speech. Click for larger version.
The Red Shoes
Some sound clips from the Red Shoes here - Anton at his most acid in his first scene. I hope to add more soon (notice will appear on the news page).
