Paul Kohner
American film producer (1903–1988)
Paul Kohner (May 29, 1902 – March 16, 1988) was an Austrian-American talent agent and producer who managed the careers of Ingrid Bergman, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, John Huston, Liv Ullmann and Billy Wilder, as well as actors who came from Europe before World War II.
Early life
Kohner was born to a Jewish family in Teplitz-Schönau, Austria-Hungary (now Teplice, Czech Republic). His father was Julius "Kino" Kohner, who managed the local movie theater and published a film industry newspaper, and his mother was Helene Kohner (née Beamt). He had two brothers, Friedrich "Frederick" Kohner, a film and TV writer who created the character Gidget (based on his daughter, Kathy), and Walter Kohner, a Hollywood agent whose wife, Hanna Kohner, in May 1953, was the first non-celebrity featured on This Is Your Life, the television show, where she was the first Holocaust survivor to talk about her experiences in concentration and death camps on television.
Career
Producer
As a young man, Kohner worked as a news reporter at his father's magazine Internationale Filmschau, which focused on the film industry. He met Carl Laemmle during an interview in Karlovy Vary in 1920. Laemmle was impressed by 18-year old Kohner and offered him a job. Kohner decided to move to the United States. Kohner started out as an office errand boy at Laemmle's company, Universal Pictures, in New York. There, he became friends with another young émigré working for Universal, William Wyler. He moved to Hollywood and worked his way up the studio system, working in positions at Universal like unit production supervisor as well as casting director.
“Paul Kohner” enters the record as american film producer (1903–1988). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Paul, Kohner and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q86560. VIAF identifies the subject as 67213739. The Library of Congress control number is no2007147390. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1988, 1953 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul Kohner” 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.