Biography for
Max Ophüls More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany

Date of Death

25 March 1957, Hamburg, Germany

Birth Name

Max Oppenheimer Ophüls

Height

5' 6" (1.68 m)

Mini Biography

Director Max Ophüls was born Max Oppenheimer in Saarbrücken, Germany. He began his career as a stage actor and director in the golden twenties. He worked in cities such as Stuttgart, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Vienna, Frankfurt, Breslau and Berlin. In 1929 his son Marcel Ophüls was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He had begun to work under his pseudonym Max Ophüls by that time. In the early 1930s Ophüls discovered the movie world and began to work as an assistant director for Anatole Litvak. He directed his first movies (Dann schon lieber Lebertran (1931), Die verliebte Firma (1932)) in that time too. Around 1933 he emigrated to France and also worked in the Netherlands and Italy for a period of eight years. In 1941 he emigrated again, this time to the USA where he worked for a period of 10 years before he went back to France in 1950. Beginning in 1954 he also worked in Germany again, mainly for German radio in Baden-Baden. Max Ophüls died in March 1957 in Hamburg, Germany and is buried on the famous cemetery Père-Lachaise in Paris, France.

IMDb Mini Biography By: Oliver Heidelbach

Spouse

Hildegard Wall

(1926 - ?) 1 child

Trade Mark

Camera movement, especially circular motion. Obsession with detail

Films often dealt with women coming to terms with their romantic allusions about love.

Nearly all of his female protagonists had names beginning with "L" (Leonora, Lisa, Lucia, Louise, Lola, etc.)

Trivia

Father of Marcel Ophüls

Max Oppenheimer adopted the pseudonym of "Ophüls" which is the name of an aristocratic German family. When his name began to spread because of his qualities as a filmmaker, the original Ophüls family wrote to him to ask which branch he belonged to, because they couldn't figure out. So the director wrote back confessing the innocent scam, to which they replied that, since he had arrived into the family by chance, he could stay: they were glad to keep him.

Was voted the 39th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 843-850. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Personal Quotes

Paris, which had always amused me on holiday, was too lovely ... emigration was no hardship, it was an outing. It offered the shining wet boulevards under the street lights, breakfast in Monmartre with cognac in your glass, coffee and lukewarm brioche, gigolos and prostitutes at night. ... Everyone in the world has two fatherlands: his own and Paris. (Spiel im Dasein)