Henny Porten

Frieda Ulricke "Henny" Porten (7 January 1890 – 15 October 1960) was a German actress and film producer of the silent era, and Germany's first major film star. She appeared in more than 170 films between 1906 and 1955. Frieda Ulricke Porten was born in Magdeburg, in what was then the German Empire. She was one of the few German actresses of the era to enter film without having stage experience. Many of her earlier films were directed by her husband Curt A. Stark, who died during World War I in Transylvania on the Eastern Front in 1916. Her father, Franz Porten, was also an actor and film director, as was her older sister Rosa Porten.

In the 1910s she worked actively in film, becoming, along with Asta Nielsen, the first German film star.

Porten founded in 1919 a film production company of her own, which in 1924 merged with the signature of Carl Froelich. Also in 1919, Irrungen was filmed, in which criticism of a social nature was exposed. The same year she acted in the version of the work of Gerhart Hauptmann Rose Bernd. In 1920, she achieved great success with films directed by Ernst Lubitsch Anna Boleyn (starring Emil Jannings) and Kohlhiesels Töchter. In 1921 she continued working with renowned directors, highlighting the production directed by Ewald André Dupont Die Geierwally, Hintertreppe (1921), by Leopold Jessner, and the 1923 film by Robert Wiene I.N.R.I. She starred in the 1924 film Gräfin Donelli, which was directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst.The actress at first was skeptical about sound movies, but finally worked with the new medium, debuting in 1930 with the film Skandal um Eva.

On 24 June 1921, she remarried, to Wilhelm von Kaufmann (1888–1959), a doctor of Jewish origin, then director of the Sanatorium "Wiggers Kurheim", in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, who thereafter took charge of the production of Porten's films. When the Nazis took power and she refused to divorce her Jewish husband, she found that her career, while doing twelve films a year, dissolved immediately. When she resolved on emigration, she was denied an exit visa to prevent a negative impression. She made ten films during the Nazi era. Her placid and reassuring persona helped calm audiences confronted with Allied bombardment. In 1944, after an aerial mine destroyed her home, she and her husband were out on the streets, as it was forbidden to shelter a 'full Jew'. After the Second World War, Porten made two films for the East German DEFA studios.

Henny Porten died in West Berlin, West Germany, in 1960. She was buried in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis Cemetery in Berlin.

In 1960, she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.