Carl Laemmle
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- This article is about Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures. See also Carl Laemmle Jr. for an article about his son.
Carl Laemmle (January 17, 1867 – September 24, 1939) born in Laupheim, Württemberg, Germany, was a pioneer in American film making and a founder of one of the original major Hollywood movie studios.
Regarded as one of the most important of the early film pioneers, Laemmle was born on the Radstrasse in the Jewish quarter of Laupheim, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1884, working in Chicago as a bookkeeper or office manager for 20 years. He began buying nickelodeons, eventually expanding into a film distribution service -- The Laemmle Film Service.
On June 8, 1912 in New York, Carl Laemmle of the Independent Motion Picture Company, Pat Powers of Powers Picture Company, Mark Dintenfass of Champion Films, and Bill Swanson of American Eclair, all signed a contract to merge their studios. The four formed a famous name in Hollywood production history: the Universal Motion Picture Manufacturing Company. Laemmle produced or was otherwise involved in over four hundred films. They formed it in 1914 with the purchase of 235 acres of land in the San Fernando Valley.
Laemmle remained connected to his home town of Laupheim throughout his life, by financial support and also by sponsoring hundreds of Jews from Laupheim and Württemberg to emigrate from Nazi Germany to the U.S. (which meant paying both emigration and immigration fees), thus saving them from the Holocaust.
Following his death from cardiovascular disease on September 24, 1939, in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 72, Carl Laemmle was interred in the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California.
Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest: "The name means 'little lamb,' and is pronounced as if it were spelled lem-lee." (Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936.)
The main character in the 1949 novel The Dream Merchants by Harold Robbins, a former Universal Studios employee, is based upon Carl Laemmle.
[edit] Carla Laemmle
His niece, Rebekah Isabelle Laemmle, known professionally as Carla Laemmle (born October 20, 1909 Chicago) appeared as a ballet dancer in the original silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and in a very small role in the early talkie version of Dracula (1931), definitely the last surviving cast member of the former, and probably the latter as well.
She left acting in the mid-1930s, but according to the IMDB she made an appearance as an elderly vampire in a 2001 movie called The Vampire Hunters Club.
