Hilde von Stolz

Who was Hilde von Stolz?

Hilde von Stolz was an Austrian-German actress.

von Stolz attended the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and made her debut at the local Kammerspielen. She subsequently performed at various theaters in Vienna and in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin.

She made her debut in film in 1928 under the pseudonym "Helen Steels". That same year, she moved to Berlin. In her second film role, she played the lead role opposite Reinhold Schünzel in Don Juan in the girls' school. von Stolz began performing under her real name starting in 1933. She established herself as a major film actress although she had to be satisfied with major supporting roles that usually portrayed elegant ladies and femmes fatales such as the actress Lydia Link in Traumulus.

von Stolz had planned to emigrate from Germany but the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 frustrated those plans. During the war she worked in a number of Nazi propaganda films, the most widely known of these was her role as the wife of Duke Karl Alexander in Veit Harlan's Jud Süß. After the war, she acted only rarely in films.

After her death in 1973, she was buried in the family vault.