Lya De Putti

Lya de Putti, born Amália Helena Mária Róza Putti on 10 January 1896 in Vécse, Austria-Hungary, was a Hungarian actress who built her reputation as a silent film performer before appearing on Broadway in 1930 in the play Made in France. Her father, Gyula Julián Gábor József Putti, was a cavalry officer who died in 1901, and her mother was Mária Rozália Kamilla, Countess Hoyos Baroness to Stichsenstein. De Putti was one of four children, with two brothers named Géza and Sándor and a sister named Mária. The date of birth recorded on her tombstone reads 1899, differing from the 10 January 1896 date found in other records.

Her performing career began on the Hungarian vaudeville circuit before she moved to Berlin, where she worked in ballet and made her screen debut in 1918. By 1924 she had risen to the position of premiere danseuse at the Berlin Wintergarten. That same period brought her to the attention of German film director Joe May, who cast her in The Mistress of the World (1919), marking her first significant film role. She subsequently appeared in Manon Lescaut and in Varieté (1925), the latter a UFA production directed by E.A. Dupont and featuring Emil Jannings. During her time in Germany she worked alongside actors including Conrad Veidt, Alfred Abel, Werner Krauss, Grete Mosheim, and Lil Dagover, and was directed by F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Throughout her career she became particularly associated with vamp characters, frequently wearing her dark hair short in a style comparable to that of Louise Brooks or Colleen Moore.

De Putti arrived in the United States in February 1926. Ocean liner records from that crossing listed her age as 26, though she told reporters at the time that she was 22. That year she starred in D.W. Griffith's The Sorrows of Satan (1926), which was released in separate versions for American and European audiences, with differences in at least one scene involving de Putti's costuming. She subsequently moved to Hollywood, where she worked with actors including Adolphe Menjou and Zasu Pitts, but did not achieve major success there. By 1929 she had left the screen to pursue a stage career, and in 1930 she appeared on Broadway in Made in France. She also traveled to England to make silent films and to study English, then returned to the United States to pursue work in sound films.

De Putti's personal life included several marriages. In 1913 she married Zoltán Szepessy de Négyes, a county magistrate at least ten years her senior, with whom she had two daughters, Ilona, born in 1914, and Judit, born in 1916. The couple divorced in 1918, after which Szepessy told the two daughters that their mother had died; a headstone in a Hungarian cemetery bore the inscription "Lya de Putti - died 1920." She later married Norwegian merchant Ludwig Christensen, who died of tuberculosis in 1922, leaving her widowed. That same year she married Louis Jahnke, a Norwegian diplomat. In the late 1920s she became involved with banker Walter D. Blumenthal and wished to marry him, but his family did not permit the union, a situation that led de Putti to undertake a hunger strike in 1931. She was also reported at one point to be engaged to Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, a former husband of oil heiress Millicent Rogers, though she denied the engagement.

Her final years were marked by a series of physical crises. In August 1930 she was nearly killed when a small plane she was traveling in crashed. In 1931 she was hospitalized to have a chicken bone removed from her throat, after which she developed a throat infection. She was transferred to the Harbor Sanitarium at 667 Madison Avenue, where she subsequently developed pleurisy in her right side followed by pneumonia in both lungs. Lya de Putti died at 1:05 A.M. on 27 November 1931, at the age of 35, leaving an estate of $1,100 and a small quantity of jewelry. She is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. It was not until the suicide of Szepessy in a Budapest hotel on 8 March 1932 that her daughters Ilona and Judit learned the truth about their mother's fate.