Willy Fritsch

Willy Fritsch (27 January 1901 – 13 July 1973) was a German theater and film actor, a popular leading man and character actor from the silent-film era to the early 1960s.

Fritsch was married to artistic dancer Dinah Grace in 1937 and became a father of two sons. The younger one, Thomas Fritsch, was a successful actor as well.Fritsch died of a heart attack aged 72 and was buried at Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg.

He was born Wilhelm Egon Fritz Fritsch, the only son of a factory owner in Kattowitz (present-day Katowice) in the Prussian province of Silesia. After the bankruptcy of his father in 1912, the family moved to Berlin, where Fritsch Sr. worked as an employee of the Siemens-Schuckert company. Young Willy originally planned an apprenticeship as a mechanic, but soon began working as an extra at the Großes Schauspielhaus theatre.