Willi Forst

His first major role was opposite Marlene Dietrich in the silent film Café Elektric in 1927. However, he was best known for his characters in light musicals, which rapidly made him a star. He developed the genre of the Viennese Film with writer Walter Reisch in the 1930s, beginning with the Franz Schubert melodrama Leise flehen meine Lieder (1933) which became an iconic role for the actor Hans Jaray and Maskerade (1934), which launched his fame as a significant director and brought Paula Wessely to international fame. He founded his own film company, Willi Forst-Film, in 1937 and considered a move to Hollywood the same year. Following the annexation of Austria in 1938, he was much courted by the National Socialists but succeeded in avoiding overt political statement, concentrating entirely on the opulent period musical entertainment for which he was famous and which was much in demand during World War II. During the seven-year Nazi rule in Austria, he only made six films, none of them political (although his ardent Vienna-Austrian topos is considered subversive of pan-German Nazism by many film historians), which are considered among his finest and classics of the Viennese Film genre. He had comparatively little success after the war except for the film The Sinner (1951) starring Hildegard Knef, which became a scandal because of the protests of the Roman Catholic church against its nudity, rare in contemporary German-speaking cinema, but which subsequently attracted an audience of seven million people. He gave international actress Senta Berger her first role in 1957 and that same year directed his last film (Vienna, City of My Dreams), after which he retired from the industry, suggesting that his style was no longer in demand. Forst is today considered one of Europe's important early sound directors. After the death of his wife in 1973, he lived a reclusive life in the Swiss canton of Ticino. He died of cancer in Vienna in 1980 and is buried in Neustift am Walde.