Schildkraut, Joseph

▪ Austrian actor

born March 22, 1895, Vienna

died Jan. 21, 1964, New York City

      Austrian-born U.S. stage, television, and motion-picture actor.

      Schildkraut joined his father, the actor Rudolf Schildkraut, on his first American tour in 1910 and remained to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (1912–13). He made his professional debut in Berlin in 1913 under Max Reinhardt and acted in Vienna from 1917 until he moved to New York City in 1920. His U.S. stage appearances included Liliom (1921; with Eva Le Gallienne) and Peer Gynt (1923) and continued through the 1950s.

      Schildkraut acted in more than 50 films, beginning with Orphans of the Storm (1922) and including Cecil B. de Mille's King of Kings (1927), in which he appeared with his father. The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), The Cheaters (1945), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) are among his other films. His best roles were as Dreyfus in the 1937 film The Life of Emile Zola (for which he won an Academy Award) and as Otto Frank in both the stage version (1955) and the motion picture (1959) of The Diary of Anne Frank.

* * *