Valdemar Psilander

Actor. Born 9 May 1884. Died 6 March 1917, at age 32. Married to the actress Edith Buemann (1879-1968).

Psilander was taken on as a student actor at Copenhagen's Casino theatre in 1901. From engagements with small touring companies, he soon moved up to major stages in the Copenhagen area. Though he never had a real breakthrough onstage, he did enjoy some success as Bill Sikes in "Oliver Twist" at the theatre Frederiksberg Teater. From 1907-1909, he was with the Dagmar theatre, where he ended his stage career.

Psilander became Denmark's biggest silent-film star. Debuting in autumn 1910 with the small Regia Kunst Film company, he was hired shortly after by Nordisk Film. In his six years at Nordisk, he made 83 films. Already after his first film, "Ved fængslets port" / "Temptations of the Great City" (August Blom, 1911), he was the studio's highest paid actor. Nordisk had a good reputation abroad at the time and a widely ramified distribution network, but the studio still needed a spearhead and Psilander's films largely filled that need. In particular, he took German, Russian and Hungarian audiences by storm. Even a mediocre script became - at least to Psilander lovers - a must-see film solely by virtue of his charisma.

Psilander starred in innumerable assembly-line productions turned out by the well-oiled Nordisk Film machine, while he also demonstrated his acting talent in films that today are considered major works of the period, including "Evangeliemandens Liv" / "The Candle and the Moth" (Holger-Madsen, 1914) and "Klovnen" / "The Clown" (A.W. Sandberg, 1916). At year-end 1916, Psilander broke with Nordisk to found his own production company, "Psilander-Film." The company never really got off the ground, before Psilander died on 6 March 1917, just 32 years old, at the pinnacle of his career.

Why was he so popular? There are several reasons. Personally, he said: "We often see fine actors become nothing in a film, because they don't understand that here concentration counts. The interesting thing about film is that we play to every social class and on every continent. Hence, we must, in our means of expression, be primitively, thoroughly authentic. (...) One can learn how to become an actor, but one can never learn to film - in film, acquired emotions become inauthentic and false. Film requires relentless veracity and authenticity." (Interview in the København newspaper, 4 March 1913.)

Bibliography: Arnold Hending: Valdemar Psilander (1942). Lisbeth Richter Larsen: Valdemar Psilander - A World Star in Danish Film (in Cinegrafie 17, 2004).