Ladies' Man: An Autobiography

Ladies' Man: An Autobiography

Best known to American audiences as the suave continental who lit two cigarettes at once as he comforted Bette Davis in the legendary film Now Voyager, Paul Henreid led a life as exciting as any Hollywood movie. The actor who created the role of Resistance leader Victor Lazlo in movie history's best-known film, Casablanca, tells the no less dramatic and colorful story of his own life beginning with his charmed childhood among the aristocrats of pre-World War I Vienna, where amiability and elegance were the order of the day for the von Hernried family. As a young man about town Paul attended balls and parties, but this carefree life ended when his father died and the family's financial status reversed. Against his mother's wishes, Paul established a career in the theatre in Vienna, London, and later New York. He recounts his refusal to join the Nazi actors' guild and his stage triumphs in England and the United States. Without bitterness, he recalls how his Hollywood film career was all but destroyed by the blacklist, upon which he was wrongly placed, and how he found a second career as a director/producer for movies and television. Paul Henreid's multifaceted career (he directed about eighty Hitchcock TV shows) spanned more than fifty years, three hundred films, and two continents. He brings to this sophisticated autobiography the same elegant, sensuous, continental style he brought to his illustrious show-business career.