AKA Hedwig Baum

Born: 24-Jan-1888
Birthplace: Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died: 29-Aug-1960
Location of death: Hollywood, CA
Cause of death: Cancer - Leukemia

Gender: Female
Religion: Jewish
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Novelist

Nationality: Austria
Executive summary: Grand Hotel

Attended Vienna Conservatory to study the harp, later playing the harp professionally and teaching music for several years in Darmstadt. After a number of novels in German, a breakthrough novel, Menschen im Hotel, was turned into a play and then at the instigation of producer Irving Thalberg into the highly successful film Grand Hotel directed by Edmund Goulding. The story details one weekend in a posh hotel in minute detail -- Baum had taken a job as maid to yield realism. The film won Best Picture Oscar. Her time in the United States made her realize it was time to leave Germany, emigrating in 1932. From that point Baum wrote many of her novels in English and took citizenship in 1938. Residing in California, she lived in Pacific Palisades, Pasadena, and then Hollywood, where she died of leukemia in 1960.

Husband: (m. 1914, div.)
Husband: Richard Lert (conductor, m. 1916)

    University: Vienna Conservatory

    Naturalized US Citizen 1938

Author of books:
Menschen im Hotel (1929, novel, "Grand Hotel")
Falling Star (1934, novel)
Men Never Know (1935, novel)
Shanghai '37 (1939, novel)
The Ship and the Shore (1941, novel)
Grand Opera (1942, novel)
Hotel Berlin '43 (1944, novel)
Mortgage on Life (1946, novel)
Headless Angel (1948, novel)
Danger from Deer (1951, novel)
The Mustard Seed (1953, novel)
Written on Water (1956, novel)
Theme for Ballet (1958, novel)
It Was All Quite Different (1964, memoir)

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