Olga Engl

Who was Olga Engl?

Olga Engl was an Austrian stage and motion picture actress who appeared nearly 200 films during her career in the film industry.

Olga Engl was privately educated in a single-sex monastery and began her acting career at the Prague Conservatory. In August 1887 she made her stage debut as Bertha in the play Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua in her hometown.

In 1888, she moved to the city of Danzig and performed in the theater from 1889 to 1892 then briefly moved to Berlin. From 1892 to 1895 she performed with the court theater in Munich and from 1895 to 1897 in Hamburg at the Thalia Theater, and from 1897 in Hanover.

Olga Engl made her film debut in the 1911 British silent film The Adoptive Child then returned to Germany and began appearing in German film productions. Her first major role was in the 1913 Carl Froelich-directed biopic Richard Wagner. She would work continually throughout the 1910s and appear in a variety of roles for such directors as Urban Gad and Frederic Zelnik and opposite such popular actors of the era as Emil Jannings, Alfred Abel and Lya Mara.

By the early 1920s, Engl's career in motion pictures was well established. In 1922 she appeared in the popular F.W. Murnau-directed eerie drama Phantom opposite Alfred Abel, Grete Berger, Aud Egede-Nissen, Lya De Putti and Lil Dagover.