Fritz Lang.

Lang trained as a painter in Paris from 1913 to 1914, returning to Vienna at the start of World War I. He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army in January 1915 and fought on multiple fronts. Severely wounded in June 1916, he was discharged with shell shock and began writing film scenarios while convalescing. Born in Vienna in 1890 to a construction company manager and a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism when he was ten, Lang briefly studied at the Technical University of Vienna before traveling through Europe and possibly Asia and North Africa from 1910 to 1914.

Lang began his film career as a writer in Berlin after being hired by producer Erich Pommer in 1918. He moved into directing and in 1920 started a collaboration with actress and writer Thea von Harbou. Together they produced Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler 1922, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried 1924, Metropolis 1927, and M 1931. Metropolis, a science-fiction film, showed his visual innovation and tyrannical on-set style. He welcomed sound with M 1931, a thriller about a child murderer starring Peter Lorre.

In 1933, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the leadership of the German film industry. Lang refused, sent his money abroad, and fled to Paris. After a year in France, he moved to the United States in 1934 under contract to MGM. His first American film was Fury 1936, a critique of lynching, followed by You Only Live Once 1937 and The Woman in the Window 1944. In the 1950s, his reputation for abusing actors made it difficult to get work. He returned to Germany in the late 1950s to make his final three films, which found little success.

Lang married Lisa Rosenthal in 1919; she committed suicide in 1920 after allegedly discovering him in a compromising situation with Thea von Harbou. Lang and von Harbou married in 1922 and collaborated on scripts, but she divorced him in 1933 after finding evidence of his relationship with Lily Latte. Lang remained close to Latte from 1931 until his death, and they married in 1971. He had no children. Lang wore a monocle and collected primitive art.

Lang’s films influenced directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, and Orson Welles. His countdown in Woman in the Moon 1929 was the first recorded in cinema and inspired real rocket countdowns. Two of his films, Fury 1936 and The Big Heat 1953, have been selected for the United States National Film Registry. He received the German Film Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Lang helped define German Expressionism and film noir.