- When the power of the National Socialism grew more and more in Germany he fled to England for the present where he could continue his career at the theater and in movies. He went to Hollywood in 1938 and was also able to gain a foothold there.
- He was highly active in the Viennese genre of shallow romantic comedies so popular in the Austria of the inter-war period.
- He became an American citizen in 1943.
- He became more active for television in the 50's where he took part in many episodes of well-known serials, at the same time he also acted in movies in the USA as well as in Germany and France.
- The actor Willy Eichberger was successfully able to have his way in the German film industry at the beginning of the 30's.
- His birth name was Willy Eichberger which he later anglicized to Charles Esmond and finally to Carl Esmond.
- Beginning in 1965, Esmond stopped receiving film offers. Since then he has acted in countless television films and series and has made countless appearances in commercials and television shows.
- It was not until many years after the end of the war that he was able to prove his versatility as an actor in Hollywood and establish himself as a character actor. The highlight of Esmond's film career was the documentary feature film Resisting Enemy Interrogation, made in 1944 for the American Air Force to reconnoiter enemy espionage tactics in the case of wartime captivity. Except for a commentary at the beginning and end of the film, the movie was professionally directed as a drama. Esmond played a German counterintelligence officer in it. The film received an Oscar nomination for best documentary in 1944.
- Suave and debonair, often sporting a pencil-slim moustache, the Viennese actor Carl Esmond fled the Nazis to continue his career first in England, then in the United States, where he worked for some of Hollywood's most distinguished directors, including Edmund Goulding, Howard Hawks and such fellow expatriates as Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur and Otto Preminger. Though he inevitably found himself playing a number of nasty Nazis, he also played several romantic roles, even if his smoothly charming exterior frequently hid a cad beneath.
- After the end of the war, he tried to build on his earlier successes in Germany, but the film industry, dominated by shallow entertainment films, did not offer him any interesting roles.
- Eichberger worked as a bank clerk in Vienna and attended the Academy of Music and Performing Arts. His teacher there was Burgschauspieler Ernst Arndt, who recommended him for a role at the Burgtheater in 1922, where he made his debut in the role of the young man in "Die Frau von vierzig Jahren".
- He went back to London in 1936, where he celebrated great success as "Prince Albert" in the stage play "Victoria Regina". In this leading role he was seen by MGM boss Louis B. Mayer in the same year and lured to Hollywood with fabulous promises. Also in the year 1936 he met Ruth Taub, whom he later married in Hollywood.
- Only in 1955, when he heard about Max Ophüls' Lola Montez film adaptation in Munich, did he play another role - Lola's doctor - in Germany.
- In 1932 he was discovered by Friedrich Zelnik for the film. Eichberger received a role in Kaiserwalzer (1933). With his second film, Liebelei (1933), he became an overnight star. The internationally successful film resulted in numerous offers for roles.
- Arriving in Hollywood in 1938, it took him months to finally accept a role as a World War I aviator in Dawn Patrol (1938), as the larger roles first intended for him as "Count Axel Fersen" in Marie Antoinette and as "Johann Strauss" in The Great Waltz had already been filled by other actors. He turned down another role for fear of repression against his family in Vienna after the SS sheet Das Schwarze Korps threatened him in Germany.
- In 1933, his agent Elisabeth Blumann, who had emigrated to England, got him several film roles in London. There he changed his name to Carl Esmond after the English press created "Iceberg" from Eichberger, which his producer felt was not a good nickname for a romantic lover.
- In March 1938, in Hollywood, he was surprised by the news of the "Anschluss" of Austria. A return to Vienna would now have been a return to the Third Reich, which he refused. As a result, Eichberger also suffered greatly from the fact that as a "German" he was almost only offered roles as a "Nazi", since from 1938 onwards there was a veritable boom in war and Nazi films, which only intensified when the USA entered the war in 1941. In order to continue to have a secure income, he nevertheless had to accept some roles. In these, however, he strove to deliver a more differentiated image of his character than clumsy clichés and images of the enemy. He was able to do this very well, for example, in Fritz Lang's mystery thriller Ministerium der Angst (1944), in which his role as a Nazi officer only shows his true colors towards the end of the film.
- Although his age was given as 33 in the passenger list when he arrived in the USA in January 1938, in his naturalization petition his birth year is stated as 1902.
- His colleague Celia Lovsky persuaded him in 1923 to move to Berlin, where Eichberger first played at the Unter den Linden theater. He was then brought to Chemnitz by director Richard Tauber (the singer's father), after which he played in the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, where he was able to establish himself as a character actor under the directorship of Hermann Röbbeling.
- He trained at Vienna's State Academy of Dramatic Arts, and made his film debut in the operetta The Emperor's Waltz (1933).
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