Anecdotes

Appeared in three films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Les oubliés (1941), Casablanca (1942) and Que le spectacle commence... (1979). Of those, Casablanca (1942) is a winner in the category.

Lotte Mosbacher, who comes from a middle-class Jewish family, worked as an aspiring stage actress in Darmstadt , among other places . After the seizure of power of the Nazis , she fled in 1934 with her first husband, the film editor Viktor Palfi , through France and Spain to the United States .

Wolfgang (Paul) and Lotte divorced after almost 50 years, close to both their deaths, when Zilzer's Parkinson's disease grew worse. Zilzer wanted to die in Germany and Lotte refused ever to go there again. Zilzer died on June 26, 1991 in Berlin, Germany at the age of 90. After a long illness, Palfi died two weeks later on July 8, 1991 in her apartment in New York City, just 20 days short of her 88th birthday.

In 1976 John Schlesinger hired Lotte Palfi-Andor, who had not worked for the film since 1952, for a small but impressive role in his thriller The Marathon Man with Dustin Hoffman . As a victim of the Holocaust , she recognizes her tormentor, the concentration camp doctor Szell ( Laurence Olivier ), and chases him screaming through 47th Street in New York City.

Lotte Palif Andor passed away on July 8, 1991, less than three weeks away from what would have been her 88th birthday on July 28.

In 1943 Palfi married actor, and German refugee, Wolfgang Zilzer, who had just changed his name to Paul Andor. They had appeared in a number of movies together and had fallen in love during the filming of Casablanca. She appeared in movie credits now as Lotte Palfi-Andor.

In 1941, Palfi and her later husband Wolfgang Zilzer did a 11-minute short movie on the evils of Nazism in Out of Darkness. She followed this with an appearance in another spy drama, playing a member of the underground named Greta, in 'Underground' starring Philip Dorn.

After the war the demand for German actors became smaller and Wolfgang Zilzer and his wife Palfi moved to New York City and concentrated more on performing on stage.

Under the stage name "Jean Brooks", the actress made her Hollywood debut in 1939 in a small role in Anatole Litvak's anti-Nazi film I Was a Nazi Spy .

In the United States, Lotte and Viktor Palfi initially found no work in their actual occupation and at times had to stay afloat as cooks or servants. The couple separated.

Mid-1980s, she published her memoirs under the title "Memoirs of an unknown actress," was published in an anthology under the title "The strange year" (in the United States Years of Estrangement ) and went with it at a reading in Berlin on .

Palfi received small, usually uncredited roles, in a number of movies in 1940 and 41.