Biography

Frank Holms was an actor known for his supporting roles in light-weight German language comedy and romantic films of the 1950s. Under his real name, Frank Diernhammer, he began his career as a dancer in Hollywood musicals in the early 1950s and later became a prominent Los Angeles photographer.

Frank Diernhammer was born in New York City to parents from Munich, Germany. His father, Franz, was working as a steward on Dutch ocean liners transiting between Europe and the U.S. before settling in New York in 1922, where he found work as a waiter. In 1936, the family returned to Munich; some sources indicate this was intended as a visit but his parents, as German citizens, were unable to leave. Subject to the same conditions as other boys of the time, Frank was compelled to join the Hitler Youth and participate in other nationalistic activities. However, at the end of World War II - being an American citizen by birth and fluent in English - he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served as a translator. Diernhammer returned to the United States in 1948, enrolling in UCLA. During the first half of the 1950s, he appeared as an uncredited dancer in a number of Hollywood musicals and also appeared on stage. At this time, his name almost invariably appeared as "Frank Dernhammer". He returned to Europe and had considerably better success in Austrian and German films and occasionally on stage, billed as "Frank Holms", albeit in secondary and usually rather shallow roles. Losing interest in acting by the late 1950s, he returned to Los Angeles, completed his Bachelor’s degree at UCLA in 1961, and transitioned to a career as a photographer. He specialized in fashion, portrait, and celebrity photography, covering the Los Angeles scene for Women’s Wear Daily. He made something of a return to acting in the 1980s, taking the occasional role on popular television series in which he frequently played a German - in contrast to his German films in which he had often played an American. In his last years, Diernhammer suffered from dementia before passing away in an Orange County, CA nursing home at age 90.
- IMDb mini biography by: G. O. Petersen