Erich von Ritzau

Bio: Remembered for bit parts in two ground-breaking films -- Intolerance (1916) and Greed (1924) -- Baron Erich Von Ritzau was actually plain Erik Ritzau, the son of the founder of the Ritzau News Agency. An immigrant from his native Copenhagen, Denmark, Ritzau added the aristocratic "Von" in California and signed on as a production assistant with the Triangle company.… More Bio: Remembered for bit parts in two ground-breaking films -- Intolerance (1916) and Greed (1924) -- Baron Erich Von Ritzau was actually plain Erik Ritzau, the son of the founder of the Ritzau News Agency. An immigrant from his native Copenhagen, Denmark, Ritzau added the aristocratic "Von" in California and signed on as a production assistant with the Triangle company. For now obscure reasons, he became Baron Gunther Von Ritzau to play one of the Pharisees in D.W. Griffith's gargantuan Intolerance. Another self-appointed "Von," Stroheim, claimed to have played the other Pharisee; not so, said Griffith assistant Joseph Henabery, who late in life verified that he and Von Ritzau were the only Pharisees. But there was indeed an association with Erich Von Stroheim, who later hired Von Ritzau to play the traveling dentist, Painless Potter, in the opening sequences of his lengthy classic Greed. Like the Pharisee, Potter's face was well-hidden by a theatrical-looking beard. Apparently a minor Los Angeles celebrity whose impending fatherhood was duly noticed by the trade-papers, Von Ritzau also portrayed the Teutonic villain Frederick Schloss in William S. Hart's 1918 The Border Wireless and played a doctor in The Prairie Wife, an MGM comedy-Western with Dorothy Devore. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi