Wera Engels was a daughter of a German Admiral and Governor of the then German colony Tsing-tau-China.
After successful leading roles in productions of the well-established German UFA-studios in Babelsberg as well as in France, Engels was invited to Hollywood.
Producers saw her as a cheap alternative to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.
She was contracted with RKO.
Engels was given roles under Walter Futter and M.
H.
Hoffman.
She and the silent movie super star Mary Pickford became best friends.
By 1935 she returned to Germany, but left soon thereafter, because of the decline of the German movie industry caused by the Nazi propaganda machine.
Back in Hollywood, she dated Gary Cooper for a while but married the Lithuanian-born actor/writer Ivan Lebedeff.
After Lebedeff's death in 1953 of Angina pectoris, she moved back to Europe, where she stayed with several friends in London and Stockholm before she went back to Germany.
She lived the rest of her life with Erna Hoffmann (widow of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's friend and personal photographer) in the Munich area.
She died on November 16, 1988 (age 79) in Munich, Germany.
Since her father died, rich and carefree Jacqueline Topelius makes magazine covers and causes social gossip with her flirtatious adventures around Europe, leaving a string of admirers behind without much concern. Her sister June, living in Paris, is all the contrary but they love each other just the same. Everything changes when Jacqueline meets Dr. Michael Thomas, who rejects her at first. Now she must choose, and also face the consequences her past life may have on their future together.
The second of the three film versions of the E. Phillips Oppenheim espionage thriller set largely in an old dark house where a tremulous wife wonders if her husband is really his double, a dastardly German spy.
Generational saga about a failed streetcar conductor, who finds success as an Atlantic City fortune teller, and his son.