Anton Walbrook – the enigmatic actor who is still remembered
As you wander through the Additional Burial Ground you can’t help noticing that some graves are overgrown and the people buried there have seemingly been forgotten. And then you come across a grave that is still tended. Anton Walbrook’s grave is one of these.
He was a refugee from Nazi Germany who had made Hampstead his home. He was born Adolf Wilhelm Anton Wohbbruck in Vienna in 1896. He always wanted to act and when black and white films started to be made his dark good looks made him an ideal movie star. He went to Hollywood in 1936 to dub a film he had made. Antisemitism had spread through German to his home country of Austrian. Because of his homosexuality and his Jewish heritage he decided he could not return home. He didn’t like Hollywood and moved to England, eventually buying 69 Frognal. He died while working in Germany 1967. He had left instructions he wanted to be buried in Hampstead.
Many people remember him as the dark, manipulative ballet master in ‘The Red Shoes’. I remember his moving speech in the 1943 film, ‘The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp’, in which as a refugee from Nazi Germany he is explaining to an immigration officer why he came to England.
The Hampstead historian and author of ‘Buried in Hampstead’, Christopher Wade, told me that he had always noticed how well looked after this grave was. One day he met a man looking after the grave. He told Christopher that he had worked in the glove department at Harrods and had sold Anton Walbrook some gloves. He thought he was such a charming man and after he heard he had died, and had no family in England, he decided to look after his grave. He lived in Uxbridge and regularly came over to tend it. I suspect he, like Christopher, has since died. However so often when you pass this grave there are stones or pebbles on it; an old Jewish custom to mark that a person who respects the person buried there has visited.
I had noticed that the grave was getting a little untidy. Then, the other day I walked past and saw that it had been tidied up, and tucked behind some stones were these photographs of Anton Walbrook, with his brooding good looks. It is good to think that he is still remembered here, in the part of the world where he made his home.