by Hal Erickson
biography
As was the case of many German-born actors relocated in Britain, Albert Lieven often as not was cast as humorless military types. His characters weren't all Nazis, though many of them behaved as though their first words as infants had been "Seig heil." In truth, Lieven, an actor on the Berlin stage since 1928, fled the Fatherland in 1933, just as Hitler was coming to power, so the cruel edge of his villainous characterizations grew from his own dislike of Nazism. Albert Lieven's best-known roles were the Austrian gigolo in Jeannie (1941), Talleyrand in The Young Mister Pitt (1941), Rommel in Foxhole in Cairo (1960), and Commander Meusel in The Guns of Navarrone (1961).
