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Fritz Leiber (actor)

Fritz Reuter Leiber Sr. (January 31, 1882 – October 14, 1949) was an American actor. A Shakespearean actor on stage, he also had a successful career in film. He was the father of science fiction and fantasy writer Fritz Leiber Jr., who was also an actor for a time.

Life

Leiber was born in Chicago, the son of Meta (Klett) and Albrecht Leiber. His father was from Baden-Baden and his mother was from Mecklenburg. Leiber was based in Chicago for most of his pre-Hollywood career. He married Virginia Bronson (1885–1970), who like him was a Shakespearean performer.

Career

Leiber and his wife spent much of their time touring in a Shakespearian acting company, known by the 1930s as Fritz Leiber & Co. Leiber made his film debut in 1916, playing Mercutio in the Francis X. Bushman version of Romeo and Juliet.

His many silent-era portrayals included Caesar in Theda Bara's 1917 Cleopatra and Solomon in the mammoth 1921 Betty Blythe vehicle The Queen of Sheba.

Lieber thrived as a character actor in sound films, usually in historical roles. His piercing eyes and shock of white hair allowed him to convincingly play a variety of characters, including priests, professors, musical professors, and religious fanatics.

In the film Champagne Waltz (1937), he portrayed an orchestra maestro; the role required him to play classical music on a violin and jazz on a clarinet. One of Leiber's larger assignments of the 1940s, and his most notable musical role, was as Franz Liszt in the Claude Rains remake of Phantom of the Opera (1943). He played a dead chemist in the movie Angel on My Shoulder (1946). He performed briefly opposite Charles Chaplin as the priest who visits Monsieur Verdoux (1947) in his prison cell.

Leiber appeared together with his son Fritz Leiber, Jr. in the wedding-feast scene of Greta Garbo's film Camille (1936), in Warner Bros.' The Great Garrick (1937), and in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) (in which Fritz, Jr. was uncredited).

Portrait collection

Often during his career Leiber had a likeness made of himself in costume and make-up for the role he was then playing, varying the format and media to include oil painting, charcoal sketching; a sculpted bust, a clay bas-relief, and others. After the actor's death, the collection passed to his son, Fritz Leiber Jr., who used the experience of inheriting this sufeit as the basis of his 1963 story "237 Talking Statues, Etc." The two Fritz Leibers also physically resembled each other enough to give casual visitors the impression that the portraits were of Leiber Jr. himself.