Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957), Austrian-American motion-picture director, actor, and screenwriter, known for his psychologically complex, meticulously detailed silent films, especially the legendary film Greed (1925). He was born Erich Oswald Stroheim in Vienna, the son of a hatter. He worked in his father's straw-hat factory and then served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian army. Stroheim emigrated to the United States sometime between 1906 and 1909, and began to create his own myth, claiming to be the son of a German baroness and an Austrian count, the graduate of a prestigious European military academy, and a former cavalry officer with an illustrious war career. Stroheim held a variety of jobs before arriving in Hollywood, California in 1914. He soon found work at D. W. Griffith's Triangle studio (see Griffith, D(avid) W(ark)), first as an actor and later as an assistant director and advisor on cinematic representation of military matters. Stroheim worked with director John Emerson on several theatrically based films and on some early films that starred American actor Douglas Fairbanks. When the United States entered World War I in 1917 and a spate of war films went into production, Stroheim was in a fortuitous position and had an ideal physical appearance to play caricatured German military officers—supercilious, arrogant, and cruel. Beginning with Old France (1917) and continuing with several films in 1918, including Hearts of the World,The Hun Within, and The Heart of Humanity, he committed various screen atrocities and became known as The Man You Love to Hate.

By the end of the war Stroheim wished to become a director himself, and he convinced Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios, to let him direct a film based on one of Stroheim's own stories. This love-triangle melodrama, Blind Husbands (1918), proved popular and launched Stroheim's career as a director. It was followed by The Devil's Pass Key (1925), also a success, and later by a third film, Foolish Wives (1922), completing what has been termed his trilogy of adultery. The latter film established an unfortunate pattern that persisted for the rest of Stroheim's career as a director: obsessed with extreme realism and meticulous in his slow, careful development of his characters' psychology, he paid little attention to either budgets or schedules.

In 1924 Stroheim signed a contract with the Goldwyn Company (soon to be merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM) and immediately began work on the film that would be both his nemesis and his masterpiece: Greed (1925), an elaborate adaptation of the novel McTeague (1899), by American writer Frank Norris. A monumentally scaled production that explores the corrupting effects of unearned money on its three central characters, it is characterized by Stroheim's ultrarealistic approach. During production, it became enormously long. The original footage may have run between seven and ten hours in length. The film was eventually taken away from Stroheim, cut drastically, and released at a running time of less than two hours. The final cut was not a success, for audiences were stunned by the film's unsparing intensity and repelled by its portrayal of the effect of money on American society. Greed recovered less than half of its cost and damaged Stroheim's reputation, but it would eventually be recognized as one of the greatest films in the history of cinema.

Because Stroheim was still under contract after Greed, he was assigned another picture, one the studio confidently expected to be a simple, commercial project: The Merry Widow (1928), a film version of the operetta by Franz Lehar. Stroheim departed from the libretto to explore the underside of the Austro-Hungarian empire, making the film a dark comedy replete with perverse eroticism and debauchery. Although it made a good deal of money (perhaps as much as $5 million), Stroheim received no compensation because MGM claimed that the profits from the film balanced out studio losses from Greed.

In 1928 and 1929 Stroheim worked on an exotic film called Queen Kelly, based on his own script and produced by American actress Gloria Swanson and her partner Joseph P. Kennedy. Stroheim's pattern of delays and budget overruns recurred, and he was eventually fired. His career as a director was ended, and he was forced to return to acting. As a performer, he appeared in a number of early sound films, including The Great Gabbo (1929), As You Desire Me (1932; with Greta Garbo), and The Lost Squadron (1932). He was given one opportunity to make a sound film at Fox Film Corporation, but this too went awry, and Walking Down Broadway (1932) was reassigned to another director.

In 1936 Stroheim went to France, where he lived most of the rest of his life and obtained acting roles in several films, including his acclaimed performance as the commandant in Grand Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir. During World War II (1939-1945), Stroheim returned to the United States and performed in more American films, including So Ends Our Night (1941), North Star (1943), Five Graves to Cairo (1945; as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), and The Great Flamarion (1945). He moved back to France after the war, but he made one final appearance in an American production, when Billy Wilder coaxed him into playing Gloria Swanson's butler/mentor in the dark comedy Sunset Boulevard (1951). In 1957, a few months before his death, Stroheim was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government.