Wera Engels
Actor
Biography
Wera Engels was a daughter of a German Admiral and Governor of the then German colony Tsing-tau-China. After successful leading roles in productions of the well-established German UFA-studios in Babelsberg as well as in France, Engels was invited to Hollywood. Producers saw her as a cheap alternative to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. She was contracted with RKO.
Engels was given roles under Walter Futter and M.H. Hoffman. She and the silent movie super star Mary Pickford became best friends. By 1935 she returned to Germany, but left soon thereafter, because of the decline of the German movie industry caused by the Nazi propaganda machine. Back in Hollywood, she dated Gary Cooper for a while but married the Lithuanian-born actor/writer Ivan Lebedeff. After Lebedeff's death in 1953 of Angina pectoris, she moved back to Europe, where she stayed with several friends in London and Stockholm before she went back to Germany. She lived the rest of her life with Erna Hoffmann (widow of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's friend and personal photographer) in the Munich area.
She died on November 16, 1988 (age 79) in Munich, Germany.
Filmography
Scent of the Woman in Black
as Edith Rance 1931
Sweepstake Annie
as Baroness Yvonne Baritska 1935
Talking About Jacqueline
as Jacqueline Topelius 1937
Hong Kong Nights
as Trina Vidor 1935
Fugitive Road
as Sonya Valinoff 1934
The Great Impersonation
as Princess Stephanie Elderstrom 1935
The Copper
as Mabel 1930
Together We Live
as Sonia 1935
English as it is spoken
1931
The Great Jasper
as Norma McGowd 1933
Lucky children
1931
The Girl from Spree Woods
1928
Fighting the White Slave Traffic
as Irene Wendtland 1927
Lützow's Wild Hunt
1927
Stjenka Rasin
as Prinzessin Dolgoruki 1936
Hast Du geliebt am schönen Rhein?
as Ellen Shiffer 1927