Biography

Character actor and singer, on stage from 1913 and in films by the following year. Usually played gentlemanly, romantic heroes or dapper officers in musical comedies or crime melodramas. As a 'suspected' Jew, he was excluded from the Reich's Theatre Chamber in 1933 and briefly interned. He was eventually released through the ministrations of his wife (the former silent star Agnes Esterházy) and fled to Switzerland. Became ensemble member/director at the Stadttheater Zürich (1940-56) and the Schauspielhaus Zürich (1956-69), specialising in operettas, as well as classical and modern plays.

Learned to play the violin and gave his first public concert at the age of seven.

In contrast to many others of Fritz Schulz's silent movie colleagues he was confronted with more extensive role offers with the rise of the sound film era.

It lasted five years after the war till the once celebrated Ufa star appeared on the screen again.

With the National Socialists there was soon proclaimed a performing prohibition in Germany for Austrian movies with Jewish participation. Many Jewish film workers began to produce own German-language movies. The first independent production company was already founded in 1934 by the emigrants Fritz Schulz, Rudi Loewenthal and Erich Morawsky, the first movie was called "Salto in die Seligkeit" (1934). But only one year later, after his direction for "Letzte Liebe" (1935), they had to shut down the production company. The press described this kind of movies as "emigrant movies" or also as independent movies.