April 3, 1943: Actor Conrad Veidt Dies

April 3, 1943: Actor Conrad Veidt dies of a heart attack in Los Angeles. He was only 50 years old.

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was born on January 22, 1893 in Berlin, Germany. He became an actor in school, fought in the Imperial German Army during World War I, and received a medical discharge after being stricken with long-term pneumonia. He first gained fame in the horror films that Germany made in response to the suffering of the war. In 1920, he played a killer in the precedent-setting The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

In 1928, he starred in The Man Who Laughs, based on Victor Hugo's 1869 novel. He played Gwynplaine, a man who had been disfigured as a boy to give him a permanent rictus grin – a.k.a. a Chelsea Grin or a Glasgow Smile. Mary Philbin played his love interest, as she had opposite Lon Chaney in the 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera. This time, she's considerably more willing -- possibly because she's blind, and can't see her boyfriend's disfigurement.

Batman creator Bob Kane would later say he based Batman in part on the 1926 silent film The Bat, and nemesis The Joker on Veidt’s appearance as Gwynplaine. Except, in those movies, the Bat was a villain and the Man Who Laughs a hero.

In April 1933, a week after Veidt's marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, also known as "Lilli" or "Lily," the couple moved to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them by the new Nazi regime.

He was banned from the German film industry, but, while in Britain, made films in English, and in French for expatriate directors following the fall of France in 1940. He especially liked playing Nazis and showing them as villains -- never more so than in the 1942 film Casablanca, where he played Major Heinrich Strasser, the film's main bad guy. Also in 1942, in Nazi Agent, he had a dual role as both an aristocratic German Nazi spy and the man's twin brother, an anti-Nazi American. 

He showed his generosity by donating toys and candy to refugee children in Britain. He also managed to get his wife's parents out of Nazi-controlled Austria.

But he had a genetic heart condition that had previously killed his mother. He died on April 3, 1943, while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, with singer Arthur Fields and his personal physician.

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April 3, 1943 was a Saturday. Richard Manuel, one of the keyboard players for the rock band known as The Band, was born.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the Stanley Cup Finals was between games. The Detroit Red Wings went on to beat the Boston Bruins in 4 straight games. So there were no scores on this historic day.