Vintage RPPC Postcard
3.5 x 5.5 inches

This high quality circus melodrama features outstanding photography and Gösta Ekman, the star of Murnau's Faust, as a clown with a heart of gold. He becomes involved in a love triangle with a circus princess and a Parisian bon vivant. This is a remake of an earlier version made in 1917, which starred Valdemar Psilander.

Gösta Ekman (1890-1938), one of the biggest names of the Swedish stage of his day, both as an actor and theatre owner. He had its stage debut in the year 1908. From 1913 to 1925 it belonged to the ensemble of the Swedish theatre in Stockholm, from 1926 to 1930 he functioned as a director of the OSCAR theatre and from 1931 to 1935 had it its own theatre, the Vasa theatre. Ekman was well-known for its expression-strong Shakespeare interpretations.

From 1911 Gösta Ekman was active in film. Ekman played a handful of film roles, including a part in Victor Sjöström's debut The Gardener (1912) and F.W. Murnau's Faust (1926). His last film role was in Intermezzo (1936), alongside his son Hasse and Ingrid Bergman. While shooting Faust in Berlin, Gösta had been introduced to cocaine by one of his fellow actors, Emil Jannings, and long-term abuse of the drug was a contributory factor in his untimely death from uraemia and pneumonia in 1938 aged just 47 years.