Lilian Harvey & Willy Fritsch ~ This card #6 from the Bunte Filmbilder cigarette card series. It is a vintage 1936 original. The edges show minor wear but it is still a nice example: VF. The card is larger than a British or American cigarette card (2¼"x2¾"). Please see my scan. I'm listing several Lilian Harvey cards this evening. Buy more than one and save on shipping!

The most popular musical star of German cinema, Harvey made many successful movies for UFA often starring with Willi Fritsch. Her Success lead to a contract with 20th Century Fox. Her brief career in American films came to naught and Harvey returned to Germany in 1935 starring in a number of films for the Nazis including Paul Martin's wildly popular romantic comedy Lucky Kids (1936). In 1938, Harvey crossed the Nazi government by helping a Jewish choreographer escape to Switzerland. Although her fame kept Harvey out of immediate peril, interrogation by the Gestapo was too much for her. Harvey abandoned her German film career and fled first to France and then to the United States.

Willy Fritsch studied drama under Max Reinhardt and entered the German film industry in the early-1920s. He became a highly popular star of light operettas and romances often opposite Lilian Harvey or Käthe von Nagy. Fritch kept working right through the Nazi domination of the German cinema averaging about one film a year including Vienna Blood (1942) and The Bat (1945). As easily as he had worked under the Nazis, Fritch continued acting in occupied Germany and then West Germany until retiring in 1964.