F.W. Murnau

In July 2015 his grave was broken into, the remains disturbed and the skull removed by persons unknown. Wax residue was reportedly found at the site, leading some to speculate that candles had been lit, perhaps with an occult or ceremonial significance. As this disturbance was not an isolated incident, the cemetery managers are considering sealing the grave.

In 2003 a retrospective of his work was shown at the 53rd Berlin (Germany) International Film Festival.

Played by John Malkovich in Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Many of his admirers consider it an outrageous caricature of the real man.

Murnau's yacht, the Bali, was pirated and later found floating off the coast of Oregon. In the 1940s, actor John Carradine bought the yacht but had only bad luck with it and, on one occasion, almost lost it and his life on a cruise to Catalina Island. Not long after, the Bali was sold and used as a garbage scow in Mexico.

He was voted the 33rd Greatest Director of all time by "Entertainment Weekly" magazine.

In 1931 Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu (1931) with documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, who left after artistic disputes with Murnau, who had to finish the movie on his own. A week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau died in a Santa Barbara hospital from injuries he had received in an automobile accident that occurred along the Pacific Coast Highway near Rincon Beach, southeast of Santa Barbara. Only 11 people attended his funeral. Among them were Robert J. Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy. Of the 21 films Murnau directed, eight are considered to be completely lost.

Directed one Academy Award-winning performance: Janet Gaynor in Sunrise (1927).

He later emigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made three films: Sunrise (1927), 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930). The first of these three is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

He created what are now considered milestones in German cinema. One of his best known was Der letze mann (1925), with an impressive Emil Jannings as a doorman who was relegated from a bell captain in a bright uniform to a cloakroom attendant. It is also considered a trend-setter for the "liberation" of the then heavy camera from the tripod. For the first time the camera moves together with the actors through the room, setting a new benchmark in filmmaking technique. Unfortunately, Murnau was forced by UFA to change the ending to a happy one, instead of his downbeat idea of having the once-proud bell captain working in toilet. He hated the new ending and did not want to shoot it, but he had no choice. As "revenge", he deliberately show the scene in an artificial, overdrawn manner.

F. W. Murnau was a German film director. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt. During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air force, surviving several crashes without any severe injuries. One of Murnau's acclaimed works is the 1922 film Nosferatu, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Although not a commercial success due to copyright issues with Stoker's novel, the film is considered a masterpiece of Expressionist film.

He directed Satanas (1920) with Fritz Kortner and Ernst Hofmann, Der Januskopf (1920) with Conrad Veidt, Magnus Stifter and the later Dracula (1931) star Bela Lugosi, and Schloss Vogeloed (1921) with Arnold Korff and Paul Bildt. These films already possessed many of the gloomy "Germanic" touches he was famous for, which still hold up to the present day. Unfortunately, some of these works are lost.

A pilot in the German Air Force during World War I, he went back to Germany after the war and entered the film business. The first movie Murnau directed was Emerald of Death (1919) with Ernst Hofmann and Margit Barnay.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 807-819. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.