Lilian Harvey
Lilian Harvey (London 1906 to Antibes 1968) was the most successful star of UFA’s musical films and one of the best-loved screen performers of late-Weimar Germany. György Rauscher painted her in Berlin in 1929, and the portrait is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (/bibliography#szamado-2019; catalogue no. 10 of the 1935 estate exhibition).
Who she was
Born Lilian Muriel Helene Pape in London to an English mother and a German father, Harvey trained in dance and came to Berlin in the early 1920s. She became UFA’s biggest operetta-film draw, above all in Die Drei von der Tankstelle (1930) and Der Kongress tanzt (1931), whose song “Das gibt’s nur einmal” is tied to her name. She worked briefly in Hollywood and in France, and left Germany at the end of the 1930s, her standing with the regime damaged by her help to colleagues fleeing the Nazis. She spent her last years in the south of France.
The Rauscher portrait
Harvey sat for Rauscher in 1929, among his Berlin film-and-theatre commissions. The portrait is held at the Komáromi Klapka György Múzeum (see /klapka-muzeum) and is catalogue no. 10 of the 1935 estate exhibition. The earlier scholarship notes that Harvey kept an estate in Hungary, one of several threads tying the Berlin set to Rauscher’s Hungarian world (/bibliography#galig-2013).
The work record is at /works/lilian-harvey-1929, and the Berlin years are narrated at /biography/berlin-years.