Curtis Bernhardt

Curtis Bernhardt (15 April 1899 – 22 February 1981) was a Jewish film director born in Worms, Germany, under the name Kurt Bernhardt. He trained as an actor in Germany, and performed on the stage, before starting as a film director in 1924, with Nameless Heroes. Other films include A Stolen Life (1946) and Sirocco (1951). Bernhardt made films in Germany from 1925 until 1933, when he was forced to flee the Third Reich — who briefly had him arrested — because he was Jewish. Bernhardt directed films in France and England before moving on to Hollywood to work for Warner Brothers in 1940. He produced and directed his last Hollywood picture, Kisses for My President (1964), about the nation's first female Chief Executive starring Polly Bergen and Fred MacMurray. He is interred at Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, near his wife, Pearl Argyle Wellman Bernhardt.