Ivan Petrovich ~ This is a vintage original cigarette card form the Drama Cigarettes series Bunte Filmbilder issued in 1936. This is card #69. It is about the size of a US baseball card. This particular example is in excellent condition.

Petrovich was born Swetislaw Petrovic in Novi Sad, Serbia, which was, at the time of his birth in 1894, part of the Austrian Empire. Although a student at the polytechnic in Prague and Belgrade, Ivan was drafted into the Serbian army in 1916. After the war, he moved to Paris and attempted to make a living as an Opera singer. His singing career led him from France to Germany and finally to the USA.

International film stardom was much less difficult in the silent era. Petrovich made films in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, and the United States. His first film, A Napraforgós hölgy (1918) was a Hungarian production but he soon followed it with the Austrian film Homo immanis (1919), German Die Tänzerin Navarro (1922), French Âme d'artiste (1924), American The Garden of Allah (1927), and British The Three Passions (1928) among others.

His first sound feature was the French film The King of Paris (1930). After the advent of sound, most of Petrovich's films were musicals. He made about 60 films in the sound era including Sissi - Die junge Kaiserin with Romy Schneider in 1956. The majority of his sound films were in either German or Hungarian.