Oscar Homolka

Oscar Homolka was an Austrian actor born in Vienna on 12 August 1898, whose career spanned stage and screen across Austria, Germany, Britain, and the United States. He appeared on Broadway between 1940 and 1959, with credits including I Remember Mama, Bravo!, Rashomon, The Last Dance, and the comedy The Innocent Voyage.

Homolka served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War before enrolling at the Imperial Academy of Music and the Performing Arts in Vienna. He launched his stage career in Austria and by 1924 had taken on the role of Mortimer in the Munich Kammerspiele premiere of Brecht's The Life of Edward II of England. That same year he appeared in the first German-language production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones and in Anna Christie. From 1925 he worked in Berlin under Max Reinhardt, accumulating an extensive list of stage credits that included A Midsummer Night's Dream, Troilus and Cressida, Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, Pygmalion, Juno and the Paycock, Doctor's Dilemma, Juarez and Maximilian, and works by Edgar Wallace, among many others. By the time he reached 30, Homolka had performed in more than 400 plays.

His film career began in Germany with silent pictures, and he later claimed to have appeared in at least thirty silent films there, as well as to have starred in the first German talking picture. Following the rise of the Nazi party, he relocated to Britain, where he appeared in Rhodes of Africa with Walter Huston and Everything Is Thunder with Constance Bennett, both in 1936. That same year he played opposite Sylvia Sidney in Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Sabotage. He also continued working on the British stage, including a production of Close Quarters alongside Flora Robson.

Homolka subsequently moved to the United States, where his imposing voice and appearance made him a frequent choice for roles as communist spies and Soviet officials. Despite that typecasting, his portrayal of the gruff but beloved uncle in the 1948 film I Remember Mama — a role he also played on Broadway — earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His American film work brought him into productions alongside Ingrid Bergman in Rage in Heaven, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, Ronald Reagan in Prisoner of War, and Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman of Chaillot. He returned to Britain in the mid-1960s to play Soviet KGB Colonel Stok in Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain, both opposite Michael Caine. His final film was Blake Edwards's The Tamarind Seed in 1974. In 1967 he received the Filmband in Gold of the Deutscher Filmpreis for outstanding contributions to German cinema.

His television work included three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1957 and 1960, a 1964 episode of Hazel, and a 1973 episode of The Protectors filmed in Austria. Homolka was also referenced by name in The Odd Couple, when the character Oscar Madison invokes him during a comic exchange about how many people named Oscar his date might know.

Homolka married four times. His first wife was German actress Grete Mosheim; they wed in Berlin on 28 June 1928 and divorced in 1937. His second wife, Baroness Vally Hatvany, a Hungarian actress, died four months after their marriage in December 1937. In 1939 he married socialite and photographer Florence Meyer, daughter of Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer; they had two sons, Vincent and Laurence, before divorcing after nine years. His fourth and final wife was actress Joan Tetzel, whom he married in 1949 and who remained his wife until her death in 1977.

Homolka made his permanent home in Britain after 1966. He died of pneumonia in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 27 January 1978, at the age of 79. He and Tetzel are buried together in Christ Church churchyard in Fairwarp, East Sussex, their gravestone distinguished by a carved pair of theatrical masks.