Trivia

His last film was My Friend Irma (1949), the movie version of a popular radio show. Bressart died during production, forcing the producers to finish the film with Hans Conried. In the final film, Conried speaks throughout, but Bressart is still seen in the long shots.

He combined his mildly inflected East European accent with a soft-spoken delivery to create kindly, friendly characters, as in Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), in which he sensitively recites Shylock's famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from The Merchant of Venice. Lubitsch also directed Bressart to similar effect in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

The influential German community in Hollywood helped to establish Bressart in America, as his earliest American movies were directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Henry Koster, and Wilhelm Thiele.

As a Jew Felix Bressart had to emigrate from Germany in 1933. In 1938, he reached the USA where he was soon offered film roles. In contrast to other emigres, his roles were artistically demanding.

At the age of 57, five days after his birthday, Felix Bressart died of leukemia in Hollywood.

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Jewish-born Bressart had to leave Germany and continued his career in German-speaking movies in Austria, where Jewish artists were still relatively safe. After no fewer than 30 films in eight years, he immigrated to the United States.

The actor Felix Bressart was born as Sally Breslau. He had his first engagement at theater in 1915 and like all great actors in those days he finally went to Max Reinhardt. He became a popular and successful comedian very fast.

MGM signed Bressart to a studio contract in 1939. Most of his MGM work consisted of featured roles in major films like Edison, the Man (1940).

To bridge the lean time till he was able to gain a foothold in the US film industry he was busy as a non-medical practitioner with his own practice in Beverly Hills.

The first movie in which Felix Bressart acted as a clumsy soldier was "Drei Tage Mittelarrest" (1930). It was a funny but also a bad movie. Later the movie was imposed with a prohibition, not in Germany but in the USA.

In his life Bressart was exactly what he impersonated in film: a shy, reserved and something clumsy human being. His clumsiness in his life and perhaps in his films were surrounded of a special tragedy. But the public found him funny - it didn't laugh so much at what happened to Felix Bressart on the screen than that it laughed at him with the roughness of children who find it funny when human beings are stuttering.