Douglas Sirk

Hans Detlef Sierck was born in Hamburg in 1897, to Danish parents. A stage director in Bremen, then director of a Leipzig theatre at the age of thirty-two, he joined a major Berlin studio in 1934 and left Germany at the end of 1937, under pressure from the regime, with his second wife, a Jewish actress. His first wife, a member of the Nazi party, had obtained a court order barring him from seeing their son, a child actor in the regime's films; after the war he learned that the young man had fallen on the Eastern Front in 1944. In the United States he made twenty-nine films, then settled in Switzerland and died in Lugano in 1987.

In the catalogue 2

• CinemaAll That Heaven AllowsDouglas Sirk · 1955Cinema
• CinemaImitation of LifeDouglas Sirk · 1959Cinema