Nils Asther

Nils Anton Alfhild Asther was born on January 17, 1897, in the Sankt Matthæus Parish of the Copenhagen borough of Vesterbro, the son of Swedish nationals Anton Andersson Asther and Hildegard Augusta Åkerlund. Although his parents were unmarried at the time of his birth, his father had promised marriage to his mother beforehand, and the couple wed on May 29, 1898, at which point Anton formally acknowledged Nils as his son. Asther spent his first year as a foster child in Hyllie, Sweden, in the care of saddlemaker Rasmus Hellström and his wife Emilia Kristina Möller, and was christened there on February 26, 1897, before being returned to his biological parents. His older half-brother, Gunnar Anton Asther, born March 4, 1892, in Caroli, Malmö, was his father's child from a previous marriage to Anna Paulina Olander, who died in July 1895.

As a young man, Asther relocated to Stockholm, where he studied acting under Augusta Lindberg. Through Lindberg he secured his first theatrical engagement at Lorensbergsteatern in Gothenburg. In 1916, director Mauritz Stiller cast him in the Swedish silent film The Wings, based on Herman Bang's 1902 novel Mikaël. In Copenhagen, actor Aage Hertel of the Royal Danish Theatre became a mentor to Asther, which led to a series of film roles in Sweden, Denmark, and Germany between 1918 and 1926. During the early 1920s, Asther also appeared on stage at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, including productions of The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Gustaf Linden, which premiered on February 27, 1923; The Admirable Crichton, directed by Karl Hedberg, which premiered on October 12, 1923; and Othello, directed by Olof Molander, which premiered on February 8, 1924.

Asther arrived in Hollywood in 1927, making his American film debut in Topsy and Eva. By 1928 his appearance had established him as a leading man, with roles opposite Pola Negri, Marion Davies, and Joan Crawford. He appeared in Our Dancing Daughters alongside Crawford, Johnny Mack Brown, Anita Page, and Dorothy Sebastian, one of his most popular Hollywood productions. He was cast opposite fellow Swede Greta Garbo in two silent films, Wild Orchids, in which he played the Javanese Prince De Gace, and The Single Standard, filmed in part on location at Santa Catalina Island in 1929. Asther and Garbo had known each other in Sweden, and the two spent considerable time together in California, frequently visiting a friend's ranch outside Hollywood and Lake Arrowhead. With the transition to sound film, Asther took diction and voice lessons to reduce his accent, and was often cast in roles where a foreign accent was not a liability, most notably as the Chinese General Yen in Frank Capra's pre-Code film The Bitter Tea of General Yen. That performance, along with his two films with Garbo, remains among his most recognized screen work. Over a career spanning 1916 to 1963, Asther appeared in more than seventy feature films, sixteen of them produced during the silent era, earning him the informal designation "the male Greta Garbo."

In August 1930, Asther entered into marriage with Vivian Duncan, one of his Topsy and Eva co-stars. The couple had one child, Evelyn Asther Duncan, referred to in the press as "The International Baby" owing to her Swedish father, American mother, and Bavarian birthplace, a combination that made her nationality a matter of legal debate. Asther and Duncan divorced in 1932. Asther was a homosexual at a time when same-sex orientation carried significant personal and professional risk. He had grown up in a devout Lutheran household and was closeted throughout his public life. He had proposed marriage to Greta Garbo, in part to conceal his sexual orientation. Rumors circulated in the early 1930s connecting him romantically to director Mauritz Stiller and writer Hjalmar Bergman, among other male colleagues, and Asther addressed some of these relationships in his memoirs. He maintained a long-term relationship with actor and stuntman Ken DuMain, whom he reportedly met on Hollywood Boulevard in the early 1940s.

Between 1935 and 1940, an alleged breach of contract resulted in a studio-based blacklist that forced Asther to work in England, where he made six films. He returned to Hollywood in 1940 and completed another nineteen films through 1949, though largely in supporting roles. In the early 1950s he pursued television work but secured only a limited number of appearances in minor series. His single Broadway credit came in 1953, when he appeared in The Strong Are Lonely, directed by Margaret Webster, which had its premiere at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York.

In 1958, Asther returned to Sweden in near-destitute circumstances. He obtained an engagement with a local theater and took four additional film roles before retiring from acting in 1963, after which he devoted himself to painting. In 1960, he had been inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a motion pictures star at 6705 Hollywood Boulevard. Asther's memoir, published posthumously in Swedish, covered the years from his birth through his return to Sweden in 1958 and included a foreword by theatre historian Uno Ericson and an afterword by Iwo Wiklander. Nils Asther died on October 13, 1981, at a hospital in Farsta, Stockholm, at the age of 84, and is buried in Hotagen, Jämtland.