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steamship tickets to the Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste. From there, Stahl had made his way to Vienna. Returned home, where to his mother he was a prodigal son, to his father a self-indulgent wastrel. He managed to live at the family apartment for a few weeks, then fled to stay on friends’ couches, and finally found a room in a cellar, half of which was given over to the storage of potatoes. A stage-struck friend – from one of the most aristocratic and impoverished families in the city – had taken to hanging around the great Viennese theatres, the ‘Burg’ and the Volksoper, and Stahl joined him and found an occasional job as an extra. He couldn’t sing, but enthusiastically mimed the words, and it was always good to have a handsome face in the crowd cheering the king. He carried his first spear in Aida , wore his first muttonchops – and had his first addictive sniff of the spirit gum that stuck them to his face – in The Merry Widow . In time, he won dramatic roles at some of the city’s smaller playhouses, worked hard, was noticed in reviews, and began to build a career.
    He loved acting.
    He’d been born to act – at least he thought so but he wasn’t the only one. It was the pure craft of it that excited him. When the circuits closed between actor and audience, when a line drew a laugh or, better, a gasp, when a pause lasted for precisely the right interval, when lines were picked up smartly from fellow players, when a silent reaction meant more than spoken words, he felt, and began to crave, that excitement. He loved also – that month anyhow – an actress named Berta and, in the spring of 1923, Berta decided to try her luck in Paris and Stahl went with her. There they lived passionately together for six weeks, almost, until she seduced a successful playwright and left for a better arrondissement. But Stahl wasn’t going anywhere. When he’d arrived in Paris it was as though a switch had been thrown in his life: everything at home and in school that had been ‘wrong’ with him was now somehow right.
    He worked hard to speak decent French, discovered the cafés where theatre people went, became one of them, and found roles he could play, even if he had to memorize his lines phonetically. By 1925 he’d been recruited for his first work in film – silent at the time, which forced the actors to communicate with face and body. Then, after Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer in 1928, the dam broke – the first French talking picture, Les Trois Masques , appeared in 1929. Later that year, Stahl had the lead role in his first sound film: the wealthy owner of a factory (Stahl) secretly goes to union meetings, falls in love with a tough slumgirl factory worker, defends the dignity of the working class, loses his family and his factory, runs away with the girl, and is shot dead at a street march in the last scene. And then, who happened to be in Paris on the honeymoon of his third marriage but Milt Freed, an executive at Warner Bros.
    Despite the fact that he and his new wife spoke only the most basic restaurant French, they took in a movie.
    ‘Stalka! Franz Stalka!’
    Stahl had just entered the hotel lobby. Shocked at hearing his real name, he stared at the man who’d called out to him: a chubby fellow with a shining bald head and a fringe of grey hair. Who was this, rising from a lobby chair, newspaper still in one hand, a huge grin on his face? Stahl had no idea, then he almost remembered, and then he did. Last seen, what was it, twenty years ago? By now the man was hurrying towards him.
    ‘It’s me, Stalka, Moppi, you can’t have forgotten!’ This in pure Viennese German.
    ‘Hello, uh, Moppi.’ This sudden incarnation was Karl Moppel, his boss at the Austro-Hungarian legation in Barcelona, lo these twenty years ago. A man he’d always called Herr Moppel, though he vaguely remembered other people at the legation using the nickname.
    Moppi shook his head. ‘Ach, I should have called you Fredric