Early life and career in Germany Sirk was born Hans Detlef Sierck on 26 April 1897, in Hamburg, of Danish parentage. His father was a newspaper reporter. He spent a few years in Denmark as a child, before his parents returned to Germany and became citizens. Sirk discovered the theatre in his mid-teens, particularly Shakespeare's history plays, and also began to frequent the cinema, where he first encountered what he later described as "dramas of swollen emotions"; one of his early screen favourites was Danish-born actress
Asta Nielsen. In 1919, he enrolled to study law at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but he left Munich following the violent collapse of a short-lived
Bavarian Soviet Republic. Between stints at university, he began writing for his father's newspaper, not long before his father became a school principal. Sirk continued his studies for a time at the
University of Jena before transferring to the
University of Hamburg, where he switched to philosophy and the history of art. It was here that he attended a lecture on relativity given by
Albert Einstein. A major influence in this period was art historian
Erwin Panofsky - Sirk was a select member of Panofsky's seminar group for a semester and wrote a large essay for him on the relationship between Medieval German painting and the mystery plays; in his 1971 interview with historian
Jon Halliday, Sirk declared, "I owe Panofsky a lot." To support himself while studying, Sirk began working as a second-line
dramaturg at the
Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. In 1922, substituting for a director who had fallen sick, Sirk directed his first production, the
Hermann Bossdorf play
Bahnmeister Tod ("Stationmaster Death"), which became a surprise success, and from that point Sirk was (in his own words) "lost to the theatre". known for
Die Saat geht auf (1935),
Streit um den Knaben Jo (1937) and
Kopf hoch, Johannes! (1941). He died as a soldier of the
Panzer-Grenadier-Division Großdeutschland on 22 May 1944 near Novoaleksandrovka, Kirovograd Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, USSR (now Novooleksandrivka, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine). By the 1930s Sirk had become one of Germany's leading stage directors, with a list of credits that included a production of Brecht's
The Threepenny Opera. Sirk joined
UFA (Universum Film AG) studios in 1934, where he directed three shorts, followed by his first feature,
April, April (1935), which was filmed in both German and Dutch versions. His exotic
melodrama films
Zu neuen Ufern and
La Habanera made a star of the Nazi cinema out of Swedish singer
Zarah Leander.
Career in the U.S. '' (1955). Left to right:
Rock Hudson,
Jane Wyman, Sirk, and
Agnes Moorehead Sirk left Germany in 1937 because of his political leanings and his Jewish (second) wife, actress Hilde Jary. Still in Europe he worked on films in Switzerland and the Netherlands. On arrival in the United States, he soon changed his German birth name to Douglas Sirk. By 1942, he was under contract to
Columbia Pictures and directed
PRC's stridently anti-Nazi film ''
Hitler's Madman for Seymour Nebenzal, the legendary producer of Nero-Film, for whom Sirk also directed Summer Storm'' (1944). Sirk briefly returned to Germany after the war ended, but returned to the U.S. and established his reputation with a series of lush, colorful melodramas for
Universal-International Pictures from 1952 to 1959:
Magnificent Obsession (1954),
All That Heaven Allows (1955),
Written on the Wind (1956),
Battle Hymn (1957),
The Tarnished Angels (1957),
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and
Imitation of Life (1959). Despite the enormous success of
Imitation of Life in 1959 (partially fueled by the scandal surrounding the murder of
Lana Turner's boyfriend by her daughter), Sirk left the United States and retired from filmmaking. He died in Lugano, Switzerland, nearly 30 years later, with only a brief return behind the camera in
West Germany in the 1970s, teaching at the film school
Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich. ==Reputation and legacy==