Adolphe Engers


Adolphe Engers was a Dutch writer and actor on stage and in the movies, who appeared in more than fifty films during his career, a number of them in Weimar Germany.

Biography

Before his career in film, he was an actor on the stage and a writer. In 1920 he published Peccavi...???, a then-scandalous novel with a gay protagonist, co-written with fellow actor Ernst Winar. A performer of considerable talent, he was to be honored for his achievements on the stage in the 1930s by an honorary committee that included Simon Carmiggelt, who related that, when the committee members understood that Engers himself was gay, withdrew from the committee one after the other.
Other works were a screenplay about the closing of the Zuiderzee, which created the artificial lake IJsselmeer, in which he was to act as well, and a play about Oscar Wilde, published in 1917, whose main themes are norms and deviancy; "deviancy" in Engers' play includes art and beauty, which are crushed by the normality of everyday society.
He appeared in the 1922 German-Dutch co-production The Man in the Background.

Selected filmography