Biography

Due to the coming of sound films and her disgust with Adolf Hitler's takeover of the German film industry, she retired to Switzerland in 1935 and never made another film. She lived out the rest of her life in quiet solitude, repeatedly refusing to talk about her film career anywhere at any time.

Her son told a film historian categorically when the latter asked to talk with Brigitte Helm about her films, "If I arrange that, she will disinherit me." She was done with cinema, once and for all.

Daughter of a Prussian army officer. She had an ambivalent attitude towards acting on screen and was somewhat coerced into an audition, after her mother sent photographs of her to Fritz Lang's wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou. Though Metropolis (1927) made her a star, she did not enjoy the experience of working under Lang and afterward refused to make another film with him. Helm was subsequently typecast as vamps and icy femmes fatale, an image cemented by Mandragore (1928). Her career went into decline after the coming of sound.

Helm incurred the wrath of Nazi Germany for "race defilement" in marrying her second husband Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist of Jewish background.

She was Josef von Sternberg's original choice for the starring role of L'ange bleu (1930), which went to Marlene Dietrich.