Albert Basserman

Albert Bassermann (7 September 1867 – 15 May 1952) was a German stage and screen actor born in Mannheim. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-speaking actors of his generation and was the recipient of the Iffland-Ring. He was married to actress Elsa Schiff, with whom he frequently performed throughout his career.

Bassermann began studying chemistry at the Technical University of Karlsruhe in 1884/85 before turning to acting, launching his stage career in Mannheim in 1887. He spent four years at the Meiningen Court Theatre before relocating to Berlin, where from 1899 he worked under Otto Brahm. In 1904 he joined the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the same year his future wife Elsa Schiff arrived at that theater. The couple married in 1908, and the following year Bassermann began working at the Lessing Theatre while continuing at the Deutsches Theater, where he collaborated with Max Reinhardt from 1909 to 1915. His stage roles during this period included Othello in 1910, Faust Part II alongside Friedrich Kayssler in 1911, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and August Strindberg's The Storm with Gertrud Eysoldt in 1913.

Among the first German theatre actors to work in film, Bassermann took the lead role of the lawyer in Max Mack's 1913 production Der Andere, based on the play by Paul Lindau. In 1915 he appeared in Egmont with Victor Barnowsky at the Deutsches Künstlertheater, and he also worked with silent film directors Richard Oswald, Ernst Lubitsch, Leopold Jessner, and Lupu Pick. In 1928 he appeared in the first staging of Carl Zuckmayer's Katharina Knie and, later that November, in Herr Lambertier by Verneuil.

In 1933, Bassermann left Germany and settled in Switzerland. According to actress Annija Simsone, who had performed opposite him at the Neue Wiener Buehne Theater in the 1920s, Bassermann refused to divorce his wife Elsa, who was Jewish, despite being told that doing so was a condition of continuing to perform in Germany during the Hitler era. He and Elsa went to Switzerland rather than comply. The couple subsequently moved to the United States in 1938. Though his command of English was limited, Bassermann learned his lines phonetically with his wife's assistance and established himself as a character actor. His performance as Dutch statesman Van Meer in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1940.

Bassermann appeared on Broadway in 1944 in Embezzled Heaven. Actress Uta Hagen, writing in her textbook Respect for Acting, described working with Bassermann in a production of Ibsen's The Master Builder, in which he played Solness opposite her Hilde. She noted that despite being past eighty at the time, his approach to the role was fully contemporary in conception and technique, and that a role he had performed for nearly forty years retained vivid, spontaneous life in his execution of it.

Bassermann returned to Europe in 1946. His final film appearance was in The Red Shoes. He died on 15 May 1952, near Zurich Airport, shortly after arriving on a flight from the United States, and is buried in Mannheim.