Donna Rifkind - The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

Nearly forgotten today, the Austrian émigré Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was a vital figure in Hollywood during the 1930s and ‘40s as an actress, screenwriter, and hostess. As Rifkind, a widely published film critic, recounts in this sparkling and long overdue biography, Viertel played opposite Garbo in MGM’s German-language Anna Christie and co-wrote the screenplays for five of Garbo’s major films, including Queen Christina and Anna Karenina. She also held Sunday afternoon open houses, which, attended by stars like Charlie Chaplin and Shelley Winters as well by writers and musicians who had fled Hitler’s Europe, such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg, resulted in a unique artistic ferment.