Quotes by Conrad Veidt

About Conrad Veidt:

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was a German actor best remembered for his roles in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Man Who Laughs (1928), and, after being forced to emigrate to Britain by the rise of Nazism in Germany, his English-speaking roles in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and, in Hollywood, Casablanca (1942). After a successful career in German silent film, where he was one of the best-paid stars of Ufa, he left Germany in 1933 with his new Jewish wife after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Britain, where he participated in a number of films before emigrating to the United States around 1941.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them.

Conrad Veidt

It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played.

Conrad Veidt

After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad.

Conrad Veidt

An actor remembers his first piece of published praise. It is written on his heart.

Conrad Veidt

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition - and winning.

Conrad Veidt

I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself.

Conrad Veidt

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.

Conrad Veidt

I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness.

Conrad Veidt

I was appalled at the amount of study necessary in order to qualify in medicine, and gradually my desire was blunted by a keener - and secret - wish to become an actor.

Conrad Veidt

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as ...

Conrad Veidt

I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me.

Conrad Veidt

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

Conrad Veidt

It is precisely as though I were possessed by some other spirit when I enter on a new task of acting, as though something within me presses a switch and my own consciousness merges into some other, greater, more vital being.

Conrad Veidt

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

Conrad Veidt

My father died. It is still a deep regret to me this day that in choosing acting as my career I was forced to hurt him. He died too early to see I had done the right, the only thing.

Conrad Veidt

No, I was not born with a monocle in my eye.

Conrad Veidt

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

Conrad Veidt

What use is there for a biography of myself? I'm just a movie actor.

Conrad Veidt

I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart an...

Conrad Veidt

My birth neither shook the German Empire nor caused much of an upheaval in the home. It pleased mother, caused father a certain amount of pride and my elder brother the usual fraternal jealousy of a hitherto only son.

Conrad Veidt

Author Bio

  • NameConrad Veidt
  • DescriptionGerman actor
  • BornJanuary 22, 1893
  • DiedApril 3, 1943
  • CountryGermany; United Kingdom
  • ProfessionActor