Biography

Former stage actor, writer and director, graduate of Vienna University, who first worked in films from 1913. Had a reputation as a director of melodramas, before his making his most famous picture, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which is considered one of the best examples of German expressionism. His other noteworthy effort in the same vein was the horror film The Hands of Orlac (1924). Wiene escaped Nazi persecution by seeking exile in France, where he died in 1938.

In 1919 Wiene helped create, with Heinz Hanus in Vienna, a professional association of film directors, which he managed until 1922. That same year he began a production for Erich Pommers of Berlin's Decla Film on the project The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). Acknowledged by contemporary critics as the epitome and starting point of the expressionist films, the picture, for which Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz supplied the film script and Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig the set design, marked a turning point in Wiene's career. Werner Krauss played the role of the mad physician Dr. Caligari, who puts on fair-ground shows by day and uses his somnambulistic slave Cesare (played by Conrad Veidt) to commit murder for his master by night. The film was an extraordinary public success, both in Germany and abroad.

After World War II historians re-evaluated him as a hack and attributed the brilliance of "Caligari" to everyone involved except the director - a dismissal as undeserved as the extravagant praise.

Brother of Conrad Wiene.

Four months after the Nazis took power, Wiene's latest film, Taifun, was banned on May 3, 1933. A Hungarian film company had been inviting German directors to come to Budapest to make films in simultaneous German/Hungarian versions, and given his uncertain career prospects under the new German regime Wiene took up that offer in September to direct "One Night in Venice" (1934).