Camilla Horn

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Camilla Horn (25 April 1903, Frankfurt am Main - 14 August 1996) was a former German dancer and a film star of the silent and sound era. She starred in several Hollywood films of the late 1920s and in a few British and Italian productions.

Biography

The daughter of a civil servant, Horn was educated as a dressmaker and worked at Erfurt. In 1925, together with Marlene Dietrich, she worked as an extra in the German film Madame Doesn't Want Any Children, and later she was seen in a musical review by director Alexander Korda.

She made her great breakthrough in 1926, when she replaced the popular American actress Lillian Gish, for the part of Gretchen in F. W. Murnau's lavish UFA production of Faust.

In 1928 she sailed for Hollywood where she played opposite John Barrymore in Tempest and Eternal Love. She returned to Europe, and in the 1930s refused to follow the official line of the Nazis and was prosecuted for a monetary offense. After the war the British tribunal at Delmenhorst convicted her for minor offenses (among them travelling without permission) and she was imprisoned for three months at the women's prison in Vechta.

From 1930 until her retirement in 1953, she remained a screen favorite in German, British, and Italian films, and late in life, she was invited to make her screen comeback, in the 1987's Schloss Konigswald. She spent her old age at Herrsching, and died at Gilching near Starnberg, where she had lived during the last year of her life.

Between April 1972 and February 1973 a song was written about her by the then-unsigned Bruce Springsteen. This still-unreleased song surfaced in the 1990s on a bootleg titled 'Early Years'.

Awards

1987 Bavarian Film Awards, Best Actress

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