The power of ‘Diary’

Anne Frank put a human face on the horrors of the Holocaust, thanks to the gift of an autograph book she received for her 13th birthday on June 12, 1942. It was just a month before her Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms in her father Otto Frank’s office building.

Until they were betrayed to the Nazis, arrested and sent to concentration camps in 1944, Anne Frank skillfully wrote, in the red-and-green-plaid cloth book with a small lock, about her life in the attic. Despite her hardships, Anne’s resiliency and luminous spirit shine throughout her lyrical prose.

Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945; only her father survived the concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam and discovered her diary in the abandoned rooms. First published in 1947, her story made its way to America in 1952 as “Diary of a Young Girl.”

Three years later, “The Diary of Anne Frank” opened on Broadway, winning the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1959, George Stevens directed the film version, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won three, including best supporting actress for Shelley Winters.

This evening, Millie Perkins, who made her film debut as the effusive Anne; Diane Baker, who played her reserved older sister Margot; and George Stevens Jr., son of the director, and associate producer and second-unit director on the film, are featured guests at a screening of “Anne Frank” at the Skirball Cultural Center. On June 16, the 50th anniversary DVD will be released by Fox.

“We had a screening of it a while back and I was stunned how powerful it is and how really timeless it is in terms of filmmaking,” says Stevens. “The Holocaust was not a word that was prominent then. This was really the first film, certainly the first big American film, about that subject.”

His father had joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and headed a film unit from 1943 to ’46. Not only did the filmmaker capture the liberation of Paris, he also gave the world footage from the Duben labor camp and the Dachau concentration camp.

“He said, ‘I had a 50-yard-line seat seeing men at their best and at their worst,’ ” says Stevens. “He said that in a way, this was his war film. It didn’t deal with the combat he had seen, but it dealt with the substance of it and the era itself.”

Baker, who also made her debut in the film, frequently thinks about her experiences making “Diary of Anne Frank.” The 71-year-old Baker, director of acting at the School of Motion Pictures and TV at the Academy Art University in San Francisco, has appeared in countless films and episodic TV including Fox’s “House.”

“I wonder what Anne would be saying today if she was here visiting us, but then she is, in her own way,” Baker adds. “We would not be sitting here today if she hadn’t had the intelligence and the imagination to write in her diary.”

Perkins, who remains close friends with Baker, gets emotional when she recalls doing the film.

“I have to be honest, every time I have to talk about or see the movie, it moves me,” says Perkins, who has continued working in such films as “At Close Range,” “Wall Street” and “The Lost City” and in episodic TV.

Perkins, now 71, was a popular fashion model when she was asked to test for the role of Anne. She had never read the book or seen the play. In fact, she had never even heard of Anne Frank. “But the minute I read the book, I emotionally identified. It just hit me in the heart.”

Perkins admired Frank’s “strong personality and unwillingness to be kept in a box and to be told how to think. She could be difficult and a pain in the neck and people would get angry with her all the time because she never kept her mouth shut about what she thought.”

Both Baker and Perkins met with Otto Frank. “I had a special day and evening with him in Hollywood,” says Baker.

“I would not have asked for anything more truthful and authentic. [But] if it was me now or even 15 years ago, I would have asked him hundreds of question. I was so timid and shy, as was Millie.”

“Her father was Anne’s favorite person,” says Perkins. “He was a lovely man. Mr. Frank and I were sitting there and you know how people will hold their hands and put their thumbs inside their palms -- so it’s like a protection thing? I used to sit that way.

“Otto Frank had his fingers that same way. At one point, he looked at me and saw [my hands]. He got tears in his eyes and said, ‘Anna used to always hold her hands just like that.’ So he, I and the memory of Anne Frank, we were all sitting there with our thumbs protected inside our four fingers.”

For information on the screening tonight go to www.skirball.org.

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susan.king@latimes.com