1889-1931
Austrian German speaking actress Ressel Orla was born on this day into a Jewish family in the town of Bozen, Tyrol in what was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire (the town is now a part of northern Italy as "Bolzano"). She started acting on the stage in Germany in 1907. When that work petered out, she turned to film work; making her debut in 1913 in the short Radium (directed by Rudolf Del Zopp). As a film actress, she was quite prolific, racking up appearances is more than 60 films between the years 1913 and 1929. Today she is most well known for being an early muse of German filmmaker Frtiz Lang. In the years before her working with Lang however, she was a wildly popular comedic actress. The first comedy that she appeared in was the Carl Wilhelm directed The Perfect Thirty-Six in 1914 (she would work with Wilhelm well into the 1920's). She also appeared in films by German directors Richard Oswald, Carl Froelich and Robert Wiene. The first film that she made with Lang was the now lost Halbblut (1919), in which she plays a "half-caste." By far her most famous appearances in Lang's work are The Spiders - Episode 1: The Golden Sea, which also dates from 1919 and The Spiders - Episode 2: The Diamond Ship (1920). By the late 1920's, Orla's health began to fail and her roles were further and further apart. The coming of sound in film also didn't help further her career for what ever reason (bit odd, considering that she spent nearly 7 years as a successful stage actor). Her last film came in 1929 in Carl Heinz Wolff's Es war einmal ein treuer Husar. With her acting work drying up, she quickly became impoverished, which did not help her health. She died in Berlin just two years later on the 23rd of July at the tragically young age of 42. I can find no information on a grave.
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