The Guardian (28/Sep/1994) - Obituary: Dolly Haas
(c) The Guardian (28/Sep/1994)
- keywords: Al Hirschfeld, Alfred Hitchcock, Dolly Haas, I Confess (1953), John Gielgud, Montgomery Clift, New York City, New York
Goodbye, Dolly - Obituary: Dolly Haas
A few years ago in New York I met the great American caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and his frail but enchanting wife, Dolly. I did not realise then that she was once the celebrated stage and screen actress Dolly Haas, remembered mainly as the vivacious, red-haired gamine in a number of German and British films of the thirties.
Dolly Haas, who has died aged 84, was a curious mixture of nationalities. Although she was born in Germany, she was British: her grandfather was a Dane who lived in England and married an Englishwoman. Her father, a friend of Sir Henry Wood, married a German and settled in Hamburg.
She studied ballet as a child, and danced professionally for the first time in a production of Die Fledermaus at the age of seven. In 1930 she made her film debut in Anatole Litvak's first feature, presciently entitled Dolly's Way To Stardom. Of her role as a hat sales-girl who becomes a cabaret artiste, the New York Times wrote: "Dolly Haas, the 18-year-old little star, has eyes like wet plums and considerable ability for grotesque dancing." In Liebescommando (1932), she played a girl who masquerades as her brother in order to join the military academy.
After the rise of Nazism, when she and her first husband, the director Hans Brahm (later John Brahm in Hollywood), came to England, she again donned trousers for Girls Will Be Boys (1934) in which she starred with Cyril Maude. It involved her getting work at the all-male estate of a mysogynistic duke. Only when she is saved from drowning while swimming in the nude is her gender revealed.
In 1936 D W Griffith came to England to direct a remake of his 1919 silent masterpiece, Broken Blossoms. However, while Dolly was contracted to play the Lillian Gish role of the Cockney waif, the director was rehearsing Ariane Borg, an unknown protegee of his. When the producers refused to use Borg, Griffith left to be replaced by Brahm. Delicately lovely, Haas, who researched the role by visiting Limehouse to watch slum children at play, was the saving grace of the film.
Her last British picture, before going to the US with her husband, was Spy Of Napoleon (1937), in which she was a dancer who believes herself to be Louis Napoleon's illegitimate daughter. The emperor was portrayed by Richard Barthelmess, the hero of the original Broken Blossoms. Ten years later, Dolly was to co-star with Lillian Gish on Broadway in Crime And Punishment, with John Gielgud as Raskolnikov. In 1948 she starred in the American musical Lute Song in London, and made a one-off return to the cinema in Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess (1953), in which she was superb as the doomed wife of the killer protected by priest Montgomery Clift's confessional vows.
In later years she and Al Hirschfeld were invariably seen at Broadway first nights, but their supreme pleasure was an annual visit to London's West End theatres. Her ashes were scattered in the English Channel off Alderney, where her sister lived and died. Goodbye Dolly.
Dolly Haas, born April 27, 1910; died September 16, 1994.
