- Born
- Died
- Birth nameBrigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm
- Height5′ 6″ (1.68 m)
- Born in Berlin, Germany. After her role in Metropolis (1927) she made a string of movies in which she almost always had the starring role, easily making the transition to sound films. Her last film was An Ideal Spouse (1935) which was released in 1935. She died on June 11th 1996 of heart failure in Ascona, Switzerland.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Dave Steup <orfila@aol.com>
- SpousesHugo Eduard Kunheim(April 1935 - 1986) (his death, 4 children)Rudolf Weissbach(1928 - 1934) (divorced)
- ParentsEdwin Alexander Johannes SchittenhelmGertrud Martha Tews
- 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.
- Helm incurred the wrath of Nazi Germany for "race defilement" in marrying her second husband Dr. Hugo Kunheim, an industrialist of Jewish background.
- 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 A Daughter of Destiny (1928). Her career went into decline after the coming of sound.
- She was Josef von Sternberg's original choice for the starring role of The Blue Angel (1930), which went to Marlene Dietrich.
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