Lucien Prival — Not Von Stroheim? (1927) 🇺🇸

There’s a certain young man who has been acting out at the First National studio in New York who caused something of a stir when he first appeared there.

His name is Lucien Prival, but you turn and look twice before you are sure that it isn’t Erich von Stroheim. He has the same closely clipped Teutonic head, the same worried look about the forehead and eyes, the same curl of the lips. And he has a leaning toward the same unpleasant type of roles.

You may have seen him in Puppets, or as the sneering German officer in The Great Deception. If not, look for him in Just Another Blonde.

He has crowded much into the short span of his twenty-five years. The child of a French father and a German mother, he was brought up in Germany, but broke away from home at an early age to go onto the stage. Aiming from the outset at morbid roles, he played in support of some of Germany’s best-known actors, until the war put a temporary halt to his promising career and, because of his father’s nationality, he was held as an enemy in Germany. It was after the armistice that he came to America.

A strange young man he is — “Abnormal or subnormal parts” is the way he describes the only roles in which he is interested.

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1927