Motion Picture (Feb-Jul 1933)

Hollywood Grabs the "Maedchen" Beauty! By Dorothy Spensley Dorothea Wieck is her name. (It's pronounced "Vheek.") She played the sensitive teacher in "Maedchen in Uniform" — and taught Hollywood something new in screen acting. Now Hollywood is teaching her English — for she has a Certain Something that the American screen needs ! A CH, JA, another foreign invader. Dorothea Olavia /\ Wieck of Berlin — pretty, middling plump, middling / % tall, past mistress in the art of repressed acting — JL jL. is Paramount' s newest importation to compete with the Teutonic Marlene Dietrich, not to mention Wera Engels and Lihan Harvey. She is the latest addition to the long Ust of Continental maidens who have come to dimple and coo for the American screen. But this one, as Ed Wynn would say, is different. She can do more with those blue-gray eyes, lash-fringed, than ever Dietrich did with her rhapsodic legs. Pardon! — limbs. She can do more with her cool, clear, meaningful gaze than ever did Marlene with all her oblique brows. Rush out and see "Maedchen in Uniform," and you'll get what I mean. This one has a mind geared for thinking, a heart adjusted for acting, a face fashioned for high tragedy. And she likes oysters for breakfast. She also likes argument; and reason, pure and otherwise, for reasoning's sake. She is twenty-five, married, thinks Americans are amazingly childlike (not childish), was a student of Max ("The Miracle") Reinhardt, has played Shakespearean roles and dotes on chicken, Vienna-style, with little boiled potatoes. Fraulein Wieck (pronounced Vheek) was born in Davos, Switzerland, January 3, 1908, and cannot understand the Did you misinterpret "Maedchen in Uniform," in which Dorothea Wieck (above) played Fraulein von Bernburg (left)? If you did, she's anxious to straighten you out! insatiable curiosity of the American reporter, who asks her what she eats for breakfast, what she does for exercise, if she loves her husband and what about her preferences in undies. D' Comes Right Out and Asks O you," she demanded with a little frown, stretching her left arm across the flat-topped desk, flattening an accusing index finger on the blotter, "do you enjoy asking me all these questions? Let me ask you that." At this sally, her manager, Georg Gumpel, slightly rotund and very friendly (he, too, is from Berlin), and Kenneth Whitmore, press-agent, sitting in on this intimate gettogether, leaned back amiably in their chairs. There was to be no talk, immediately, either, of Hitlerism, the Nazis, Jewish "persecutions," Steel Helmets, State motion picture control, war debts, boj'cotts or any of the more turbulent questions that are rocking Central Europe. These gentle subjects, we gathered, are vcrbotcn. One does not declare oneself politically, if one wishes to return to the Fatherland. The meeting continued with all the gaiety of a Sing Sing picnic with the turnkey as guest of honor. She made twelve silent motion pictures before talkies came along, played the singing role of Mekila in Offenbach's " Parisienne Life," was a member of the Josephstadter Theatre in Vienna, has spent summers in the Tyrol, in Sweden, in Freiburg, in Grunewald, in Falckenburg, in Vienna, in Frankfort, in Munich. Also a few winters. She has a Swedish grandmother from whom she got her middle name but, "Olavia" being too synonymous with olive oil {Continued on page 80) 53