Hermann Vallentin

Hermann Vallentin 24 May 1872 18 September 1945 was a German actor born in Berlin He was the son of a Jewish timber merchant and factory owner Felix Vallentin He was the older brother of actress Rosa Valetti After training as an actor at the Royal Theatre in Berlin with Max Grube and Hans Oberländer he received his first engagement at the CentralTheatre in Berlin in the 189596 season In the next few years appearances on various Berlin stages followed From 1914 Vallentin was also a film actor He mostly embodied fatherly figures patriarchs and directors but also smallminded philistines In the 1931 film version of Der Hauptmann von Köpenick he played the uniform tailor Adolph Wormser The seizure of power by the Nazis in 1933 ended his film career abruptly In 1933 Vallentin emigrated to Czechoslovakia where he appeared on German language stages in Ústí and Prague In 1938 he left for Switzerland and worked at the Stadttheater Basel and the Schauspielhaus Zürich In 1939 he emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv Not being able to speak Hebrew he retired from acting altogether In Tel Aviv he lectured read poetry and was a sporadic anchorman for Germanlanguage news on the Palestine Broadcasting Service PBS He died in Tel Aviv in 1945 aged 73