Ernst Lubitsch
German-American actor and film director (1892–1947)
Ernst Lubitsch (; January 29, 1892 – November 30, 1947) was a German and American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch". Among his best known works are Trouble in Paradise (1932), Design for Living (1933), Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not to Be (1942) and Heaven Can Wait (1943).
He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director three times, for The Patriot (1928), The Love Parade (1929), and Heaven Can Wait (1943); his pictures The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour with You were also nominated for Outstanding Production in 1932. In 1946, he received an Honorary Academy Award for his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture.
Early life
Lubitsch was born in 1892 in Berlin, the son of Anna (née Lindenstaedt) and Simon Lubitsch, a tailor. His family was Ashkenazi Jewish; his father was born in Grodno in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), and his mother was from Wriezen outside Berlin. He turned his back on his father's tailoring business to enter the theater, and by 1911 was a member of Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater.
Career
Early work, 1913–1921
In 1913, Lubitsch made his film debut as an actor in The Ideal Wife. He gradually abandoned acting to concentrate on directing.
The public source identifies “Ernst Lubitsch” as german-American actor and film director (1892–1947). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ernst, Lubitsch and German-American.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q51562. VIAF identifies the subject as 56627503. The Library of Congress control number is n50043553. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1947, 1932 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ernst Lubitsch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.