Alexander Granach

Alexander Granach, born Jessaja Szajko Gronach on April 18, 1890, in Werbowitz, Austrian Galicia (present-day Verbivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine), was a Jewish actor who built a distinguished career across European theater and film before establishing himself in the United States. He died on March 14, 1945, in New York following a pulmonary embolism that resulted from an appendectomy.

Granach's early theatrical career took shape at the Volksbühne in Berlin, where he rose to prominence on the stage. He entered film in 1922, and among his most enduring work from that period was his role as Knock in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), a loose adaptation of Dracula in which Knock served as the film's counterpart to the character Renfield. He continued working in German cinema into the sound era, appearing in the notable early talkie Kameradschaft (1931).

When Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Granach, who was Jewish, fled to the Soviet Union. Finding conditions there equally unwelcoming, he relocated to Hollywood, where he made his American film debut in 1939 playing Kopalski in Ninotchka, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production directed by Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo. During the war years, Granach took on roles on both sides of the ideological divide, portraying Gestapo Inspector Alois Gruber in Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Julius Streicher in The Hitler Gang (1944). His final film appearance came in MGM's The Seventh Cross (1944), a production whose supporting cast consisted largely of prominent European refugees.

In 1944, Granach appeared on Broadway in A Bell for Adano, adding a stage credit in his adopted country to a career that had spanned continents and decades. That same year marked his last screen work before his death the following March.

Granach was buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Springfield Gardens, Queens. He was survived by his longtime partner, Lotte Lieven, and his son, Gad Granach, who lived in Jerusalem and later wrote his own memoirs containing extensive references to his father. Granach's autobiography, originally published in 1945 under the title There Goes an Actor, was reissued in 2010 by Transaction Publishers under the title From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor.