- Born
- Died
- Robert Wiene was born on April 24, 1873 in Breslau, Silesia, Germany [now Wroclaw, Dolnoslaskie, Poland]. He was a writer and director, known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Das wandernde Licht (1916) and The Knight of the Rose (1925). He died on July 17, 1938 in Paris, France.
- Former stage actor, writer and director, graduate of Vienna University, who first worked in films from 1913. Had a reputation as a director of melodramas, before his making his most famous picture, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which is considered one of the best examples of German expressionism. His other noteworthy effort in the same vein was the horror film The Hands of Orlac (1924). Wiene escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in France, where he died in 1938.
- Brother of Conrad Wiene.
- In 1919 Wiene helped create, with Heinz Hanus in Vienna, a professional association of film directors, which he managed until 1922. That same year he began a production for Erich Pommers of Berlin's Decla Film on the project The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Acknowledged by contemporary critics as the epitome and starting point of the expressionist films, the picture, for which Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz supplied the film script and Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig the set design, marked a turning point in Wiene's career. Werner Krauss played the role of the mad physician Dr. Caligari, who puts on fair-ground shows by day and uses his somnambulistic slave Cesare (played by Conrad Veidt) to commit murder for his master by night. The film was an extraordinary public success, both in Germany and abroad.
- He was something of a maverick, maintaining his creative independence until Goebbels' film ministry took it away. If.
- Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 1202-1206. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
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