'Nosferatu' Stars Mystery Lives

LOS ANGELES (AP) â€” His very name meant ``ultimate terror.'' <br><br>Decades after his death, German silent-film actor Max Schreck has become the ultimate mystery. <br><br>Little is known about

Thursday, January 25th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

LOS ANGELES (AP) â€” His very name meant ``ultimate terror.''

Decades after his death, German silent-film actor Max Schreck has become the ultimate mystery.

Little is known about the man outside of his notoriously creepy role as a disfigured vampire in the 1922 silent classic ``Nosferatu.''

``He's as mysterious to me as he is to many other people,'' said Charlie Lustman, proprietor of the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. ``Schreck's performance in 'Nosferatu' is one of the most hypnotic and creepy ever captured on film.''

The new movie ``Shadow of the Vampire'' playfully suggests Schreck performed the rodent-fanged villain so well because he was a real-life monster who sucked the blood from his co-stars and crew.

There is also speculation that Max Schreck never existed at all.

Some believe that it was a pseudonym employed for the horror film as protection against typecasting for the man behind the vampire makeup.

The rumor is fueled by the fact that pictures of Schreck without his makeup are rare, there are few records of his life and most of his later films have been lost, said David J. Skal, a film scholar and author of ``Hollywood Gothic'' about the history of vampire movies.

``He really was a real actor, with a real career,'' Skal said. ``Without the makeup, he rather resembled Max von Sydow â€” tall and lanky.''

Born in 1879 in Berlin, the young Schreck abandoned more traditional work for a life in theater

He began training at the Staatstheater (State Theater) in Berlin and later toured Germany for several years with an acting troupe before settling again in his home city.

At some point, Schreck met and married fellow stage actress named Fanny Normann, Skal said. In Berlin, he joined with a group of performers, led by famed theater director Max Reinhardt, and worked in obscurity as a character actor.

Then came the breakthrough role as the gaunt, clawed Count Orlock in director F.W. Murnau's ``Nosferatu.''

``Schreck wasn't very well known and he achieved immortality only through this one performance,'' Skal said. ``This was the only out-and-out horror film he ever appeared in.''

Reinhardt introduced Schreck to Murnau, who hired the actor for his loose retelling of Bram Stoker's ``Dracula.''

However, Murnau never secured the rights to the book.

``This film was plagiarized, even though they changed the names of the characters,'' Skal said. ``They basically stole it.''

A lawsuit from Stoker's widow resulted in an order to destroy all copies of the movie.

That cost Schreck the career boost he may have expected from the film, which survived only through bootleg copies that appeared occasionally across Europe and later the United States.

Since the movie was distributed illicitly, Schreck never benefited directly from the performance, which is now considered one of the great vampire characters of all time.

``There's not an inch of his performance in that movie that evokes the underlying humanity at all,'' said Steven Katz, screenwriter of ``Shadow of the Vampire.'' ``You have the feeling that you're looking at something you shouldn't be looking at.''

Schreck returned to the Munich theater in 1926, and played small roles films until his death 10 years later from a heart attack. No performance ever approached the magnitude of the shadowy count in ``Nosferatu.''

The movie only began gaining respectability, Skal said, after a complete version of the film was assembled from the various bootlegs following World War II.

Willem Dafoe, who plays the fictionalized Schreck in the new movie, said he felt a kinship with the late actor, who never reaped the benefits of his performance.

``It always sends a chill down my spine,'' Dafoe said. ``There's a brotherhood of actors, and somehow I feel sorry for the guy. It's like, it's just sad.''