save him from the cinema!" Career From 1917 until his death, Veidt appeared in more than 100 films. One of his earliest performances was as the murderous somnambulist Cesare in director Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), a classic of German Expressionist cinema, with Werner Krauss and Lil Dagover. His starring role in The Man Who Laughs (1928), as a disfigured young outcast servant whose face is cut into a permanent grin, provided the (visual) inspiration for the iconic Batman villain the Joker. Veidt starred in other silent horror films such as The Hands of Orlac (1924), also directed by Robert Wiene, The Student of Prague (1926) and Waxworks (1924), in which he played Ivan the Terrible. Veidt also appeared in Magnus Hirschfeld's film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others, 1919), one of the earliest films to sympathetically portray homosexuality, although the characters in it do not end up happily. He had a leading role in Germany's first talking picture, Das Land ohne Frauen (Land Without Women, 1929). He moved to Hollywood in the late 1920s and made a few films there, but the advent of talking pictures and his difficulty with speaking English led him to return to Germany. During this period, he lent his expertise to tutoring aspiring performers, one of whom was the later American character actress Lisa Golm. Emigration Veidt opposed the Nazi regime and later contributed funds for the relief of Britains during the German Blitz bombings. Soon after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, by March 1933, Joseph Goebbels was purging the film industry political opponents and Jews. In April 1933, a week after Veidt's marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, also known as “Lilli” or “Lily,” the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them. Goebbels had imposed a "racial questionnaire" in which everyone employed in the German film industry had to declare their "race" to continue to work. When Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about his Rasse (race) by writing Jude (Jew). Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was, and Veidt would neither renounce the woman he loved nor collaborate with the regime as many others did. Veidt was opposed to antisemitism and showed solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of