Robert Thoeren

Robert Thoeren
Born	21 April 1903 Brünn (Brno), Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	13 July 1957 Munich, West Germany
Occupation(s)	Screenwriter, Film actor
Years active	1930 - 1957

Robert Thoeren (1903–1957) was a German screenwriter and film actor. Thoeren was born in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War the German-speaking Thoeren emigrated to Germany where he became a theatre and film actor. Thoeren appeared in leading roles in several German-language films made by Paramount at the Joinville Studios in Paris.

Thoeren went into exile following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, first in France and later in the United States. Thoeren had already ceased acting and begun writing screenplays for films and became a top writer in the United States working with leading directors including Joseph Losey and William Dieterle. Thoeren returned to Germany after the Second World War and continued his career as a screenwriter. His story idea for the 1935 French film Fanfares of Love and its 1951 German remake Fanfares of Love was used as the basis for Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot released in 1959, two years after his death.

He married the German actress Erica Beer in 1957, but died in the same year in a car crash.

Selected filmography

Actor

• Tropical Nights (1931)
• Woman in the Jungle (1931)
• The Squeaker (1931)
• That's All That Matters (1931)

Screenwriter

• Dark Eyes (1935)
• Fanfare of Love (1935)
• Hotel Imperial (1939)
• Rage in Heaven (1941)
• Summer Storm (1944)
• Mrs. Parkington (1944)
• Singapore (1947)
• An Act of Murder (1948)
• The Fighting O'Flynn (1949)
• My Daughter Joy (1950)
• September Affair (1950)
• The Prowler (1951)
• Bandits of the Highway (1955)
• Sarajevo (1955)
• Petersburg Nights (1958)
• Some Like It Hot (1959)

Bibliography

• Gemunden, Gerd. A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder's American Films. Berghahn Books, 2008.
• Phillips, Gene D. Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

External links

• Robert Thoeren at IMDb