Lil Dagover — Meet Europe’s Girl-Friend — And America’s Newest Thrill (1932) 🇺🇸

The only vital statistic about Lil Dagover that has leaked out up to now is that she has the world’s most beautiful back.

by Elisabeth Goldbeck

Anyone to whom you mention the new Warner Brothers star can tell you the dimensions of the German beauty’s back, and that it’s insured for twenty thousand dollars. But you really ought to know more about her, for you never can tell — she may become Marlene Dietrich’s rival on this side, just as Marlene became her rival abroad.

Odd though it may seem, there are other things about the brunette Miss Dagover that are far more revealing than her back. She isn’t an actress who depends on an area of bare flesh for her appeal. But because she is a foreign import, because of her much-publicized spine, and because for some occult reason she loves to wear a huge velvet bow under her chin, Lil has the reputation of being a spectacular woman, of the Damita-Dietrich school.

After reading the meagre advance reports, you half-expected her to dye her fingernails purple, to dispense with the more intimate items of lingerie, and to make every act a sensation. So it’s practically news when you find that behind the bow there sits a woman of poise and dignity and considerable intelligence.

Lil Dagover — who stands five feet, six inches tall, weighs 103 pounds, and has green-brown eyes — differs from the flaming ones as the moon from a bursting bombshell. She has a great deal of genuine animation and spirit, when roused. But she has no artificial vivacity.

Her fingernails are a reassuring and almost forgotten shade of pale pink, and she indulges in no antics. She’s not an egomaniac, and has none of the jealous antagonism toward other women that seems to afflict some of the famous ones.

She resembles these two

The American actresses she resembles most are Lynn Fontanne and Florence Vidor, which gives you an idea of what a well-behaved woman she must be. Her face is pale and calm, with high Russian cheekbones and dark eyes of a slightly Eurasian cast. She was born in Java, Dutch East Indies, of a German father and a French mother.

Because of its long association with Diamond Lil and Lil Tashman [Lilyan Tashman], her first name has come to have a flashy, flippant tone, and therefore does not become her. The name her parents gave her was Lilith Witt.

When Lil at last listened to high-priced persuasion and signed the contract to come to America and make a talkie, her first act was to engage an English teacher. For three months she studied painstakingly, and then discovered that her tutor spoke with a pronounced English accent, which left Lil in a hole — she found she was unable to understand Americans. Despite this setback, she now speaks remarkably good English (and American), and can understand everything spoken at a normal tempo. She hates very fast talkers, because she can’t understand a word they say, and it gives her the depressing feeling that she really hasn’t learned English after all.

In conversations with Americans, she always murmurs the phrase in German before putting it into English. She knows you don’t understand a word of it, but it seems to comfort her.

She finds Americans almost too polite in one way. They never laugh at her mistakes in English, but they never correct her, either.

She is strangely lacking in personal vanity — or perhaps hers is vanity in its highest form. At any rate, to save the wear and tear on her beautiful skin, she wears absolutely no make-up in the daytime except lipstick, and prefers not to wave her hair. At night, when even the most flawless complexion looks slightly corpse-like without the aid of cosmetics, she considers it a social duty to use make-up.

Explaining her figure

She’s also one of those raw-vegetable-and-fruit eaters, and sticks to her vegetarian diet except when diplomacy demands that she toy with a bit of meat.

Lil Dagover is noted for always wearing white, from underwear to ulsters. It’s her caprice. She prefers it because she thinks it’s most becoming to her. She even has a white limousine, and she loves pearls. But as a concession to her friends, who may get sick and tired of it, she has five floaty chiffon evening dresses for entertaining at home, all made exactly alike, in different pastel shades. With these she wears a trailing chiffon handkerchief.

Pastels and black are her only choices in the matter of color. She hates red and a hard bright blue, and if she has to wear those colors in a picture she is utterly wretched, and can’t act.

She loves Hollywood. She didn’t see much of it during the weeks when she was making The Woman from Monte Carlo, but she liked her work and her fellow actors. She went to the Mayfair Ball — the first big social event of the season — which proved interesting.

“But I would rather not see celebrities in person,” she remarked. “It’s a little disillusioning. I like to see them in pictures, to read articles about them. But it’s better always to see them at a little bit distance.”

She thinks Garbo is the most beautiful woman on the screen. “For my taste, she is the most beautiful I have ever seen. But I think Anita Page is typical of American beauty. She came to a party which I attended, and she was so lovely, so sparkling, with her soft face and baby mouth and round eyes.”

Don’t call her another Garbo

She deeply resents the popular form of publicity which compares every foreign actress with Garbo and accuses each one of imitating her.

“I used to wear high round necks on my dresses a great deal, and they were especially becoming to me. But I can’t any more, because Garbo does it. It seems now you must study carefully everything she wears and everything she does, and then not do it, for fear of being called an imitator. I can’t bear that!”

She stood up and spoke with passion.

“I would rather be a very bad Dagover, than the best copy of Garbo!”

Yet Garbo is her favorite actress. She finds her always interesting, always new, and likes her equally well in person.

“She is very simple, very modest. You never would suspect her fame. At a party, she will sit quietly in a corner and listen to other people. I have been told that she laughs a great deal and is very gay — but I never saw it.”

The comparison-makers would have to bend over backward to call Lil Dagover another Garbo. Lil’s only resemblance to Greta is that she likes to walk in the rain. She isn’t the husky outdoor type, and her only sport is swimming, which she does fairly well, though not often. But she really loves to put on walking shoes, take her dogs on the leash, and go for long walks in the country.

Her fondness for dogs is almost fanatical, when you consider that she kept one of her chows even after he attacked and bit her severely on the arm, leaving permanent scars. She was in the hospital for four days, and wore her arm in a sling for weeks, but when she got home the dog was again on his good behavior and she couldn’t bear to have him killed.

Where she got her name

At seventeen she married an actor, Fritz Daghofer, which name she later modified to the softer-sounding Dagover. She has a little daughter, who is being brought up by her married sister in England. “Because my sister can give her the home and the time and attention I can’t give her.”

Lil herself had a very unhappy childhood. Her German father was overseer of forests in Java, for the Dutch government. White children living in Java, it seems, must be brought back to a cold climate every seven years, to renew their health and their vitality. When Lil was six, her mother brought the children back to Europe, and before their visit ended, the mother died.

So the two sad little girls were left stranded in Europe, passed around from one aunt to another, sent off to a different boarding school every winter, living in a haphazard and lonely fashion. Lil cannot forget this, and wants her own little girl to have some constancy and devotion, even if it has to be in her aunt’s home.

While Lil was still in school, she began thinking about the stage. So when, some years later in Berlin, she met the German director, Robert Wiene, and he told her she had a perfect film face, she was in a mood to cooperate. She signed a four-year contract, and became Germany’s most famous feminine film star. Every American who saw The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or “Tartuffe, the Hypocrite” will remember her.

But they probably won’t recognize her in her new incarnation as a Hollywood beauty. Her contours have been altered considerably to suit the American taste, and so successfully that in February, she will be back from Germany — where she is now fulfilling a stage engagement — to make more pictures here. And if Germany will let us have Lil, as well as Marlene (and they’re entirely different), maybe we ought to be broad-minded and say Germany doesn’t owe us a thing.

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Back in Germany, Lil was even more famous than Marlene Dietrich — and who knows what may happen now in Hollywood? You have your first glimpse of her in The Woman from Monte Carlo

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Did You Know That —

• Maurice Chevalier is trying to convince Marlene Dietrich that they ought to do a picture together?
• Buddy Rogers, besides leading a New York hotel orchestra and broadcasting, is in the new Ziegfeld show, Best Wishes?
• When Conchita Montenegro received a stage offer from Ziegfeld — supposedly at Buddy’s behest — Fox renewed her lapsed contract?

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, March 1932

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A newcomer from Germany, Lil Dagover is about to make her debut on the American screen with a talent and personality that have endeared her to foreign audiences. Make no mistake about this new star. She has the necessary poise and beauty to build an American public. The line should form quickly to the right to see her in “The Captain’s Wife”

Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, January 1932