Camilla Horn

The daughter of a civil servant, Horn was educated as a dressmaker and worked at Erfurt. In 1925, together with Marlene Dietrich, she worked as an extra in the German film Madame Wants No Children, and later she was seen in a musical review by director Alexander Korda. She made her great breakthrough in 1926, when she replaced Lillian Gish as "Gretchen" in F. W. Murnau's UFA production of Faust.

In 1928 she sailed for Hollywood, where she played opposite John Barrymore in Tempest and Eternal Love. She returned to Europe, and in the 1930s refused to follow the official line of the Nazis and was prosecuted for a monetary offense. After the war the British tribunal at Delmenhorst convicted her for minor offenses (among them travelling without permission) and she was imprisoned for three months at the women's prison in Vechta.

From 1930 until her retirement in 1953, she remained a screen favorite in German, British, and Italian films, and late in life, she was invited to make her screen comeback, in the 1987's Schloss Konigswald. She spent her old age at Herrsching, and died at Gilching near Starnberg, where she had lived during the last year of her life.

Between April 1972 and February 1973 a song was written about her by the then-unsigned Bruce Springsteen. This still-unreleased song surfaced in the 1990s on a bootleg, "Early Years".[1]

• 1987 Bavarian Film Awards, Best Actress

• Camilla Horn at IMDb
• Camilla Horn at Find a Grave
• Photographs and literature
• Brief biography