Lya De Putti — Biographical Sketch (1927) 🇺🇸
Though both stage and screen have provided many exciting incidents in the lives of actresses, it is doubtful if any one of them has had a career so full of varied thrilling incidents as little Lya de Putti, whose early environment was planned to avoid just this sort of thing.
Miss de Putti, born in Hungary, in a small town near Budapest, was raised as a strict aristocrat, her mother being Countess Heyes, and her father Baron de Putti, an Italian from the Tyrol, and a cavalry officer until he met her mother and gave up the army upon marrying her.
Thinking herself entirely self-reliant at the early age of eleven, Lya departed the family fireside without permission and joined up with a small traveling circus. She was promptly apprehended and dispatched to a convent for four years.
Lya decided to become a nun, but eventually gave up the idea during a summer vacation and got employment as a “pony” in a small vaudeville chorus in Budapest.
In 1918, in Bucharest, she was arrested by the secret service as a Hungarian spy. After a vigorous investigation she was released as blameless. She then fell in love with Count Louis Christianson, an attaché of the Swedish Embassy in Berlin. Shortly after their happy marriage the husband passed away a victim of consumption.
In 1921, when Lya was the solo dancer in a Russian classical ballet at the Winter Garden in Berlin, she came under the observation of Joe May, then the greatest of German directors, and was given a rôle in a picture called “The Hindu Tombstone.” Her success was almost immediate, and she became a reigning sensation in European films. “Variety” was shown in America and Lya sprang into immediate popularity here.
Miss de Putti was much sought by picture producers in America, and won success in such photoplays as The Prince of Tempters, First National; “The Heart Thief,” Metropolitan-DeMille; God Gave Me Twenty Cents, and Sorrows of Satan, Paramount; “Midnight Rose,” and “Buck Privates,” Universal.
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Lya de Putti
- Variety
- God Gave Me Twenty Cents
- Sorrows of Satan
- The Heart Thief
Collection: Motion Picture News, October 1927 (Booking Guide and Studio Directory)