- For the movie The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. Frederick Hollander wrote an enormous score: 15 songs, two ballets and a parodic concert based on "Ten Happy Fingers." (A 16th song, "Count Me Out," was eliminated early on.) The composing job was an attractive challenge for Hollander: rather than just using incidental songs, here music would be integral to the plot and conception of the film. There would be huge amounts of scoring, running almost from beginning to end, with two ballets. Initial publicity reported that Hollander had composed an unheard-of 24 songs. It verged on "an unusual children's opera for adults," as Hollander called it.
- He not only composed the score for A Foreign Affair (1948) but also appeared in it as Marlene Dietrich's pianist.
- Father of Melodie Hollaender.
- Friedrich Hollaender had brief appearances in the movies "Der blaue Engel" (1930) und "Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht" (1931). And in 1933 he even realised the movie "Ich und die Kaiserin" (1933) as a director.
- In 1956 he returned to Germany and again worked for several years as a revue composer at the Theater Die Kleine Freiheit in Munich.
- He had a solid music and theatre family background: his uncle Gustav was the director of the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, and his uncle Felix was a well-known novelist and drama critic, who later worked with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater.
- He had been taking music lessons from a very early age; one of his teachers was composer Engelbert Humperdinck.
- In 1919 he married the actress Blandine Ebinger, the couple divorced in 1926. Their daughter Philine later became the wife of the cabarettist Georg Kreisler.
- After his film career ended he wrote several books, among them his biography "Von Kopf bis Fuss" (1965).
- He emigrated via France and England to the US, where he was able to continue his film career in Hollywood. Because music is an international language he was not confronted with the linguistic barriers, as many emigre actors were, in order to continue to work. He even managed to work on two movies as director.
- His rising career in Germany came to an abrupt end with the rise to power of the virulently--and violently--anti-Semitic Nazi party, since Holander was a Jew.
- He followed in his father's footsteps and became a successful composer of numerous shows in Berlin during the '20s. He also founded, together with Mischa Spoliansky, Blandine Ebinger, Kurt Tucholsky and other artists, the cabaret "Schall & Rauch". In addition, he wrote works for the cabaret "Die Wilde Bühne" by Trude Hesterberg and also founded the "Tingel-Tangel-Theater".
- As "Frederick Hollander", he also wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Those Torn From Earth, which was released in 1941.
- His father Victor Hollaender was a successful operetta composer who wrote music for different shows in Berlin and his mother was the singer Rosa Perl.
- Nominated for four Oscars but never won one.
- His first film composition was for Sumurun (1920).
- Born in London, England, where his father, operetta composer [Victor Hollaender ], worked as a musical director at the Barnum & Bailey Circus.
- He made a cameo appearance in One, Two, Three (1961) as a Kapellmeister.
- By age 18 he was employed as a répétiteur at the New German Theatre in Prague and also was put in charge of troop entertainment at the Western Front during World War I.
- In 1931 he opened his own satirical cabaret, the Tingel Tangel Theater in Berlin, where he spoofed fashions and foibles of the day, including politics.
- As a youth he had a passion for classical music and his idol was composer Richard Strauss.
- In the mid-'20s he wrote and directed small revues that spoofed fashions and morals of the big city, as well as theatrical scores for director Max Reinhardt.
- A committed progressive and pacifist, he took a stand for reproductive freedom, women's rights and economic justice, and he blasted anti-Semitism and the rising Nazi movement on his tiny stage, while bloody street battles raged outside the doors between Nazi and anti-Nazi factions.
- In the fall of 1955, he packed up his bags and returned to Germany with an ambitious new musical, "Scherzo", in his suitcase.
- His biggest hit of the early '20s, the 1923 novelty song "Liliput," was a worldwide hit and became known in the US as.
- In 1899 his family returned from London to Berlin. His father began teaching at the Stern Conservatory, where his son became a student in Engelbert Humperdinck master class. In the evening he played the piano at silent film performances in local cinemas, developing the art of musical improvisation.
- His score for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953) was one of the works of which he was most proud, and arguably the most significant, albeit under-appreciated, contribution of his 22-year American career.
- In May 1933 he relocated to the US, where Erich Pommer had negotiated a three-year-contract at Fox for him.
- As an outspoken progressive satirist, a jazz musician and a Jew, he was for the Nazis a symbol of Weimar decadence and intellectual subterfuge, and he was targeted for it.
- When the family made a visit to New York in 1912, where father Victor had been hired to write some shows, Friedrich would spend his afternoons playing at the nearby movie theater, whose proprietors were so charmed that they called his parents and begged them to let the boy stay a while longer, for his music was so delightful.
- He returned to Germany in the mid-1950s and settled in Munich. He directed musical revues--with mixed success--and later also appeared on television.
- Hollander's greatest opportunity for a full-blown musical came with fellow Berliner Ernst Lubitsch's 1948 operetta That Lady In Ermine, starring Betty Grable. Unfortunately, Lubitsch died after filming the musical numbers and Otto Preminger finished the work.
- In 1944, Hollaender married actress Leza Hay, followed by his fourth marriage, to Berthe Jeanne Kreder, in 1946.
- In 1932, he married the dancer and actress Hedi Schoop and in the same year, his revue "Es war einmal" had its premiere. But after several performances were disturbed by Nazi thugs, the show was closed. Hollaender made his debut as a film director with "Ich und die Kaiserin". One week after the film's premiere, the board of the Ufa was already eliminating contracts with Jewish artists and staff. Hollaender, whose apartment was demolished by the Nazis, emigrated to Paris with his wife. He later wrote about the experiences of the emigrants in his novel "Those Torn From Earth", which was published in 1941 with a preface by Thomas Mann.
- An accomplished pianist, Hollaender also discovered and played with Berlin's best jazz band, Weintraub's Syncopators, and his songs became standards of the cabaret and dance band repertoire.
- In the last few years of his life, known again as Friedrich Hollaender, he devoted his energies to writing his memoirs and experimental novels.
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