Brigitte Helm: Silent Film Icon

Star of Fritz Lang's Metropolis

By Jiffy Burke
May 1, 2007

With her golden hair, heart-shaped face and animated acting style, Brigitte Helm rose to great fame in the German silent film industry of the early 1930s. Her career began with a brilliant performance in Fritz Lang's Metropolis in 1927. After a career lasting only a single decade, she left Berlin and the film industry forever in 1942 but remains a recognizable movie icon.

Brigitte Helm was born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm on March 17th, 1908 in Berlin, Germany. She was the daughter of a Prussian army officer who died when she was very young. While she always had an interest in acting and appeared in many school performances, Brigitte was a serious student and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. Her mother had other plans and secretly sent Brigitte's photos to Thea von Harbou, screenwriter and wife of director Fritz Lang, who showed some interest in the expressive young girl. Brigitte's mother persuaded her to audition and take a screen test for the prominent director's upcoming film project, the silent movie classic Metropolis.

At the tender age of 19 this unknown newcomer was selected for the main role (more accurately, a double role) as the workers' evangelist Maria and her doppelganger Futura the Machine Human. Taking on Maria's appearance, the robot Futura stirs rebellion in the hearts of the workers, becomes an exotic dancer to seduce the upper class, and takes pleasure in destruction. Contrastingly, the true Maria acts as a Madonna to save the rebelling workers' children from the flooded workers' quarters of Metropolis. Brigitte's appearance as Maria, with her large eyes and narrow, heart shaped face framed by a halo of golden hair contrasts with the appearance of the robot, yet seems oddly familiar. The groundbreaking design of the Machine Human has become an iconic reference point throughout the science fiction genre, most directly in Osamu Tezuka's anime film Metropolis.

From the very auspicious beginning of her career, Brigitte was promoted as the future star of the UFA studio by the German press, yet she frequently disagreed with the studio over her wages and the roles offered to her. Brigitte's most memorable acting roles include Alraune (silent movie 1928, sound film 1930), The Loves of Jeanne Ney (1927), and The Lady of Atlantis (also called Queen of Atlantis, 1932). It is worth mentioning that Brigitte made a successful leap from silent film to sound, maintaining her screen presence and expanding her acting skill with each film.

Following the enormous success of Metropolis, Brigitte Helm starred in more than thirty German, French and English language films from 1927 to 1935. Brigitte Helm's memorable performance brought her great fame and made her an instant star of the silver screen. Her unique combination of flexible physical presence, ethereal beauty and expressiveness should have brought her a range of roles, but directors were so taken with her performance as the scheming, sultry vamp in Metropolis they repeatedly cast her as the femme fatale.

Despite her eventual distaste for this type of role, Brigitte performed the sultry, ultra feminine protagonist with a playful honesty and became an icon of German cinema in the 1930s. Brigitte was known for her ability to walk that fine line between meditated cruelty and unconscious innocence, subtly displaying a wide range of emotions from regret to joy. What had been a dream of career success for the young girl became an ongoing nightmare for the adult actress as Brigitte hoped to play more "modern" female roles.

She was widely regarded as the embodiment of the 1930s feminine ideal, the tall, cool sophisticated woman who also maintained an air of unattainable innocence. Brigitte Helm is credited with establishing the mold for the classic femme fatale role that would become a source of fame for her contemporary Marlene Dietrich and later for such luminaries as Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck and Faye Dunaway. Interestingly enough, it has been said that Brigitte was director Josef von Sternberg's first choice for the part of Lola in The Blue Angel (in German Der Blaue Engel), considered the first major sound film made in Germany. When Brigitte turned him down flat, refusing to play yet another vamp, Marlene Dietrich was cast in the part which firmly established her as Germany's next major femme fatale icon. Dietrich's performance as Lola as well as her concert performances later in life have had long-reaching influence in film and television. Lola's night-club act served as inspiration for Madeline Kahn's role in Mel Brooks's western comedy Blazing Saddles.

Toward the end of her short film career, Ms. Helm was fined for a traffic violation in 1933. After a pedestrian was badly injured in a 1934 accident, Brigitte served two months in prison. Shortly thereafter she made one final film appearance (Gold, 1934) before realizing just how dissatisfied she had become with her public image as a femme fatale.

Despite an acting career lasting only one decade, Brigitte Helm withdrew from the film business without a backward glance when her contract with the studio UFA ended in 1935. Specifically, while Brigitte did not enjoy being repeatedly type-cast as the vamp, she particularly did not like the way the Nazi-influenced German state was portraying women in films at that time. She married her second husband, the millionaire industrialist Dr. Hugo Kunheim and began her new role as wife and, eventually, mother to four children. In 1942 the couple left Germany for Italy because they did not agree with the policies of the increasingly powerful Nazi regime.

In later life, Brigitte Helm lead a quiet life out of the spotlight, raising her four children. She refused all interview requests and preferred not to speak about her film career. Very little is known about her activities after she abandoned her film career. Brigitte Helm died of cardiovascular failure at the age of 88 in 1996 in Ascona, Switzerland, her adopted home of over 30 years.

Metropolis — Wikipedia entry for Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis
Brigitte Helm - obituary — New York Times, June 14, 1996, by Robert McThomas and Peter Herzog