Some actors who have had success playing Dracula, such as Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, have gone through periods where they must have wondered if they'd ever get the chance to play anything else. Max Shreck, who starred in the first (unauthorized) film adaptation of the Bram Stoker novel, F. W. Murnau's gloriously contaminated 1922 silent horror poem Nosferatu, shook off the role easily in life, but posterity has boiled his career down to this one role. Shreck, who worked in the German theater and was part of Max Reinhardt's company in Berlin before making his film debut 1920 and died of a heart attack in 1936, when he was only 56 years old. Because he left behind no other film work as important as Nosferatu--his follow-up collaboration with Murnau, a comedy called Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs, was a bomb--and because he appeared in Nosferatu in a grotesque, rodent-like make-up that rendered his features unrecogniable, the passage of time has given Shreck the reputation of a man of mystery. The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich as Murnau, was a darkly comic fantasy in which it was revealed that "Shreck" was an actual vampire (played by Willem Dafoe) that the director had brought in to lend his authenticity to the role. It was rooted in a film-scholar in-joke that went back decades.
Now a German author, Stefan Eickhoff, has written the first biography of the actor, Max Schreck -- Gespenstertheater ("Ghost Theater"). For some of us, the first shocking revelation is that Max Shreck's real name was...Max Shreck. Because the name "Shreck" happens to also be the German word for "fear", it became a constant in books about horror movies that "Max Shreck" was obviously a gimmick name created just for this one movie. There was even speculation that the pseudonym concealed not some obscure performer but a famous actor hidden in the jagged-toothed, pointy-eared makeup. In fact, Schreck was neither a superstar in a Halloween mask nor a one-shot found object; he was a working actor who appeared in more than twenty-five films after Nosferatu but whose early death and undistinguished filmography would have consigned him to posthumous obscurity were it not for his one classic movie role. The miracle is that Nosferatu is the one film he made that was, by legal edict, supposed to be lost; all copies were ordered destroyed as part of a settlement with the Bram Stoker estate. Of the new book, Eickhoff says that "Whoever hopes to discover a vampire will be disappointed, but they will find an actor of real skill and versatility."