Mady Christians - 16403

Austrian actress. Christians came to the U.S. in 1912 to appear with her parents in a German-speaking theatre they established in New York. After making one film in the States, Audrey (as Margarete Christians, 1916), she returned to Germany to study with Max Reinhardt. In the 1920s she starred in numerous German plays and films, plus a few Broadway productions. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, she returned to America for good, shuttling between Hollywood and Broadway. Christians made her first Hollywood film, The Only Girl, with Charles Boyer in 1933. Later films include Escapade (with William Powell, 1935), Seventh Heaven (with James Stewart, 1937), Heidi (1937), Tender Comrade (with Ginger Rogers, 1943), Address Unknown (1944), Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and All My Sons (with Burt Lancaster and Edward G.Robinson, 1948). Christians' screen career was ended during the McCarthy-era when she was blacklisted after being accused of being a communist sympathiser. This is a very early Ross Verlag sepia postcard, boldly signed ("Margarete Christians") in dark blue ink. The only time Christians was listed in any film credit as "Margarete" was in 1916, when she starred in Audrey , a 5-chapter serial in which she played an orphaned girl, turned over to a couple who took her money and treated her like a slave. The face on the postcard is that of a young girl, so it likely that this is a publicity photograph for Audrey. Condition is excellent. VERY RARE.