Salka Viertel

Salka Viertel (June 15, 1889 – October 20, 1978) was an Austrian actress and Hollywood screenwriter. While under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937, Viertel co-wrote the scripts for many movies, particularly those starring her close friend Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina and Anna Karenina (1935). She also played opposite Garbo in MGM's German-language version of Anna Christie (1930). Viertel was known as the "social connector" within the large European émigré community of artists who settled on the West Side of Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s.

Early life and career Viertel was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city then in the province of Galicia, which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today is in western Ukraine. Her father, Joseph Steuermann, was a lawyer and the first Jewish mayor of Sambor Her siblings were Eduard, a composer and pianist; Zygmunt, a Polish national football player who perished in the Holocaust; and Rosa (1891–1972), married from 1922 until her death to the actor and director Josef Gielen.

Stage career After debuting as Salome Steuermann at the Pressburg Stadttheater (regional theater), Salka earned starring roles in Germany and Austria before and during World War I. In 1911, she acted briefly under the direction of Max Reinhardt in Berlin. Following that, she accepted an offer in 1913 to go to Vienna and work in the Neue Wiener Bühne theater. There she met her husband, author and director Berthold Viertel, and they married in 1918. Her husband meanwhile was in Berlin much of the time, working for UFA, the major German film production company. He also co-founded the collective theater Die Truppe. The Viertels then moved to Düsseldorf when Berthold was appointed director of the city's renowned theater.

In 1928, at F.W. Murnau's instigation, the Viertel family emigrated to Hollywood when Berthold received a contract with Fox Film Corporation as a director and writer. Historian Thomas Saunders notes that, as with U.S. universities in the 1930s, the Hollywood studios could be very selective because "the list of émigrés reads almost as a who's who of Weimar production." Saunders ranks Berthold Viertel as "only marginally less significant" than other émigrés whom he considers "without peer."

Film career Despite her stage successes in Germany and Austria, Salka struggled to obtain a foothold as a film actor. She agreed with Max Reinhardt (whom the Viertels encountered in New York on their way to Los Angeles) Over the next couple of decades, Viertel was a mentor and confidante to the famous Swedish actress. It was Garbo who encouraged Viertel to write screenplays as an alternative to film acting. It was said, "the path to a Hollywood production with Garbo was through collaboration with Salka Viertel." In 1932, during Hitler's ascendancy, they decided to stay in Santa Monica, where their sons grew up.

The Viertel home became the site of salons and meetings of the émigré community of European intellectuals along with Hollywood luminaries, particularly at Sunday night tea parties that Salka hosted. Professor Ehrhard Bahr dubbed this cultural sanctuary of distinguished artists and intellectuals, many of them from German-speaking countries, "Weimar on the Pacific".

Besides acting as a diplomat within the ethnically and politically diverse expatriate colony, Viertel also played a practical role as a go-between who could accelerate projects and careers. in part by serving as a founding member of the European Film Fund, Salka Viertel's well-received memoir, The Kindness of Strangers, was published in 1969 (it was reissued in 2019).

Selected filmography Actress Seven Faces (1929) as Catherine the Great Anna Christie (1930, German-language version) as Marthy Owens The Mask Falls (1931) The Sacred Flame (1931) Screenwriter Queen Christina (1933) The Painted Veil (1934) Anna Karenina (1935) Conquest (1937) Two-Faced Woman (1941) Deep Valley (1947) The River (1951) - uncredited Loves of Three Queens (1954) Prisoner of the Volga (1958) Commentator My Name Is Bertolt Brecht - Exile in U.S.A. (1988) - this documentary film includes clips of Viertel discussing her friendship with Brecht during the 1940s when he lived near her in Santa Monica and was attempting to break into Hollywood screenwriting.