Victor Arnold

Victor Arnold was a Vienna born comic actor of the German stage during the second decade of the 2oth century, who mentored the future film director Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin and encouraged him to go for comedy roles rather than heavy drama.Arnold was short and stocky and not especially good looking and used these characteristics to good effect. He worked with pioneering director Max Reinhardt and with Felix Hollaender. Arnold and Lubitsch played together in the films The Perfect Thirty Six and The Pride of the Firm.Arnold also was in an early version of the Sumurun story which Lubitsch would later film. In the lead up to WWII, Arnold's mental health deteriorated and he was put in a sanatorium after which he cut his throat in October of 1914.