Oscar Homolka was born on August 12, 1898 in Vienna, Austria. The son of a sewing machine salesman and part-time cantor, Homolka was a vessel for his homemaker mother’s frustrated acting ambitions. Homolka began his career on the Viennese stage, but was soon working in the more prestigious theater communities in Berlin and Munich. His first movies were two classic silent expressionist films, ‘Abenteur eines Zehnmarksheins’ (‘The Adventures of a Ten Mark Note,’ 1926)and ‘Hokuspokus’ (1930). After the Anschluss, as with any Jewish artist able to escape, Homolka emigrated to England, and, then, later to the U.S. In 1936, he starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Saboteur,’ and took on the persona that would keep him employed, but usually typecast, for the rest of his career. His thick European accent, bushy eyebrows and short, stocky peasant’s body saw him cast as the archetypal Russian or East European villain. A definite look-alike for Soviet Politburo Chairman, Leonid Brezhnev, the resemblance led to his being cast as the Communist spy heavy in scores of films such as ‘Funeral in Berlin’(1967), ‘The Billion Dollar Brain’ (1968) and ‘The Tamarind Seed’ (1974). A deeply gifted actor, Homolka would, now and again, get plum roles like his academy-award nominated performance in‘I Remember Mama’ (1948) as the crusty Uncle Chris, Dr. Brubaker in ‘The Seven Year Itch,’ and Marshal Kotuzov, military savior of Russia in ‘War & Peace’(1956). One of the main reasons Homolka worked in hundreds of movies was the alimony he had to pay out to each of his four exquisitely beautiful wives. His first wife was the

famous Hungarian andYiddish-theater film actress, Grete Mosheim. They married in Berlin in 1927, and were divorced in 1937. His second wife, Baroness Vally Havatny, another Jewish Hungarian actress, was supposedly the true love of his life. She died four months after they were wed in December 1937, the victim of a drunk driver. In 1939, Homolka married the Washington Post heiress, Florence Meyer, a photographerand socialite with whom he had two children before divorcing. His last wife was an English actress, Joan Tetzel, who was with him on January 27, 1978 when he died of pneumonia in London, England. An amusing sidebar to Homolka’s career is that his name is often raised in vain by the cartoon character Krusty the Clown in the Fox t.v. show ‘The Simpsons,’ when his humility and Jewish identity are questioned. “Ossskar Ho-molka!!!� Krusty lustily exclaims.

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