Curt Goetz was a well-known stage and movie actor, director, and playwright. His plays--he wrote only comedies, mostly drawing-room comedies--enjoyed great success in their time and are still popular. He also translated works of like-minded authors, such as Noël Coward, into German.

Goetz was born on 17 November 1888 in Mainz to Bernhard Alexander Heinrich Werner Goetz, a Swiss citizen, and Selma Rocco Goetz, a German. His father died when Goetz was less than a year old. The family then moved to Halle, where Goetz's mother managed a nursing home from 1890 to 1906. Goetz's plan to become a physician, like his Swiss grandfather, had to be abandoned for financial reasons. He left the gymnasium at the completion of the tenth grade and moved to Berlin to take acting lessons from Emanuel Reicher, but money problems cut his training short. In 1908 he was hired as an actor by the Stadttheater...