Curt Bois; Actor Fled Nazi Germany for Hollywood

Curt Bois, one of the self-designated Actors in Exile who fled Germany for Hollywood after the Nazi takeover in the early 1930s, is dead.

Bois, a character actor whose many screen roles included a pickpocket in “Casablanca,” was 90, said a statement issued by Berlin’s Schiller Theater released over the weekend.

The statement said he died Dec. 25, but did not explain the delay in reporting his death. Bois, a Berlin native, most recently had been working at the Schiller.

He began performing in theaters and post-World War I cabarets as a boy in Germany, and worked for legendary directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, who revolutionized drama with his “confrontational” stagings of works by playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht.

In film, Bois specialized in comic roles. He appeared in 27 movies by 1933, when he left Germany for Hollywood after the rise of the Nazis.

Bois added 40 more while in exile in the United States, most of them small but memorable roles as headwaiters or pompous clerks.

“Curt Bois was able to see the opportunity for creating a pithy miniature from even little roles,” a Munich newspaper said in an obituary.

His first film in Hollywood was “Tovarich” in 1937, followed by “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse,” “That Night in Rio,” “Hold Back the Dawn,” “Cover Girl” and many more.

He returned to Germany after World War II and concentrated again on stage and cabaret performances, generally to the praise of Germany’s critics.