Biography

This elegant actor of the golden age of German cinema appeared in several masterpieces, before the cameras of such inspired geniuses as Lang, Lubitsch and Murnau. Vocation had come rather late in his life, though. Abel was indeed already 33 when he made his first film. Beforehand, he had been a forester, a gardener and a shopkeeper. But one day, while watching a film with Asta Nielsen, he was struck by revelation. He decided at once to become an actor and with the help of Nielsen in person he started a fruitful screen career. He also wrote and directed a few films. He died too soon aged only 57, but having honored the German screen with his noble, dignified figure in more than a hundred pictures.
- IMDb mini biography by: Guy Bellinger

German actor and director of the 1920s-1930s. He was born in Leipzig on March 12, 1879. In his youth he was a gardener, a traveling salesman and a merchant, but worked as an amateur actor as an avocation. From 1907 to 1910 he was a bank clerk, on his way to a bureaucratic career, when he saw Asta Nielsen on the screen, and felt compelled to act professionally and with greater commitment. It was Nielsen himself who, in 1913, advised him to devote himself to cinema. Abel never left the theater, alternating stage work with films. He specialized in characters with an outwardly chilly countenance who had warm hearts underneath. As a director, he himself noted the influence of Ernst Lubitsch and F.W. Murnau on his work. His first film as an actor was in 1913, and his first as director was in 1921. He worked throughout the rise of the Third Reich, dying relatively young in 1937.
- IMDb mini biography by: <jumblejim@prodigy.net> Jim Beaver

Buried in the Friedhof Heerstraße cemetery in Berlin. His tombstone has since been lost, and his exact burial place is unknown.

First studied to be a forester and later studied gardening in Saxon Mittweida. He then changed his area of study to business before transitioning into art/acting.

Was married to Elizabeth Seidel with whom he had one daughter, Ursula (1915-1951). Also an actress, Ursula was a victim of the Nazi regime in 1935 that prohibited her from appearing in subsequent films after she failed to produce ancestry papers for her father to prove he was not of Jewish descent.

He has an entry in "Dictionnaire du Cinéma/Les Acteurs" by Jean Tulard published in Paris in 2007 (page 8).

Son of Louis Abel, a peddler, and Anna Maria Selma Abel.