- Born
- Died
- Birth nameOscar Hugo Homolka
- Nickname
- Oscar Homolka
- Because of his heavy generically "European" accent and Slavic-sounding surname (not an uncommon one among Czechs or Slovaks), many people assumed Oscar Homolka was Eastern European or Russian. In fact, he was born in Vienna (then Austria-Hungary), the multicultural capital of a large multi-ethnic empire at the time. It was there he began his successful stage career, which eventually led him to Hollywood. Homolka was one of the many Austrian and specifically Viennese actors (many of them Jewish) who fled Europe for the U.S. with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Although often typecast in villainous roles - Communist spies, Soviet-bloc military officers or scientists and the like - he was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Uncle Chris in I Remember Mama (1948).- IMDb Mini Biography By: [email protected]
- SpousesJoan Tetzel(May 29, 1949 - October 31, 1977) (her death)Florence Meyer Homolka(August 21, 1939 - August 8, 1946) (divorced, 2 children)Baroness Vally Hatvany(December 2, 1937 - April 5, 1938) (her death)Grete Mosheim(June 28, 1928 - 1933) (divorced)
- Expressive face and thick European accent.
- By his own account, he made at least 30 silent films in Germany and starred in the first talking picture ever made there.
- In 1939 he married socialite and photographer Florence Meyer (1911-62), a daughter of "The Washington Post" owner, Eugene Meyer.
- Fled Germany in 1933 to Paris after the Nazis took over, then London where his career soon resumed on the stage and in film. Soon thereafter he was invited to the US, where he spent most of the next 14 years as a character actor, generally playing a cruel or bumbling European whose thick accent and thicker eyebrows were his key defining attributes.
- His first wife was Grete Mosheim, a German actress of Jewish ancestry on her father's side. They married in Berlin on 6/28/28, but divorced in 1937. She later married Howard Gould. His second wife, Baroness Vally Hatvany (d. 1938), was a Hungarian actress. They married in December 1937, but she died four months later.
- He returned to England in the mid-'60s to play Soviet KGB Col. Stok in Funeral in Berlin (1966) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967), opposite Michael Caine. His last film was the Blake Edwards romantic drama The Tamarind Seed (1974).
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