{"id":3597,"date":"2013-08-28T20:58:17","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T00:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=3597"},"modified":"2020-06-06T11:25:39","modified_gmt":"2020-06-06T15:25:39","slug":"sugar-daddy-notes-on-otto-kruger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=3597","title":{"rendered":"Sugar Daddy: Notes on Otto Kruger"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Otto<\/a>

Otto Kruger in ‘Cover Girl’: One of his rare non-villain roles — but we still root against him.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1905, when Otto Kruger was still a very young man, he earned his living by playing the piano for silent movies. He was an accomplished pianist as well as a violist and cellist, but when he left Toledo, Ohio, to attend Columbia University, he decided to become an actor instead of a musician. If he was as fine a musician as he was an actor, it was the music world’s loss. What a shame he never seems to have played an instrument in any of his motion pictures!<\/p>\n

Here’s how Kruger once described his career to an interviewer: “For a while I played sad husbands. Then I got nothing but lawyers, and during the War, I specialized in Nazis .\u00a0.\u00a0. Then they had me play sugar daddies.” I can’t think of a better overview of his career than his own. The lawyers he played were nearly always crooked; most of his business tycoons were blackguards in pinstriped suits. Kruger’s villains nearly always wore stripes (pin or chalk), but never<\/em>\u00a0horizontal ones.<\/p>\n

‘Saboteur’: The Nazi in White Tie<\/span><\/h1>\n

Here he is in one of his best known roles: Tobin, the Nazi spymaster, in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” (Universal, 1942):<\/p>\n