Biography

In Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, Lilian Harvey's duet with Willy Fritsch from the 1936 film "Glückskinder", Ich wollt' ich wär ein Huhn ("I wish I was a chicken") can be heard playing on a phonograph in the basement scene "La Louisiane" as well as in the extended scene "Lunch With Goebbels", as Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) happily sings a portion of the song after deciding to hold a private screening of the film. After the screening, cinema owner, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), under the alias "Emmanuelle Mimieux", comments on liking Lilian Harvey in the film - to which an irritated Goebbels angrily insists her name never be mentioned again in his presence.

German matinée idol of the 1930's, a cheerful singing and dancing star of musical comedies and operettas. Fritsch was trained at the Max Reinhardt School in Berlin and acted on screen from the early 1920's. He successfully made the transition to sound and was then popularly paired with the actress and dancer Lillian Harvey in several films. After the war, he eased into character roles.

Though he had joined the NSDAP, Fritsch tried to avoid getting involved in Nazi propaganda (except for his appearance in the 1944 aviator movie Junge Adler which earned him an entry on Goebbels' Gottbegnadeten list) and managed to survive the Hitler era without any loss of prestige.

Willy Fritsch was married with the actress Dinah Grace (1918-1963). After her death he retired from the film business.

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 resorted to the occupation as an extra at the Großes Schauspielhaus theatre.