Percy Adlon

Born on June 1, 1935, in Munich, Paul Rudolf Parsifal “Percy” Adlon was the result of the sporadic relationship between an opera singer, Rudolf Laubenthal, and Susanne Adlon-Meyerhöfer, heiress to the founder of the five-star hotel Adlon, from Berlin, recognized as one of the best in the world. He grew up in Ammerland, a town next to Lake Starnberg, in Bavaria, under the strict discipline of his mother, who served as an inspiration for the strong women who predominate in his cinema. He studied Art, Theater History and German Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilian University, in his hometown, where he joined the student theater troupe as an actor.

After playing supporting roles in a couple of German miniseries, he went to work for a radio station, and later for the BR Fernsehen channel, for which he produced programs on art and the human condition. “During that stage I learned a lot, because for my documentaries I talked to a lot of people, so I learned what families are like, and I realized that ordinary madness abounds. If you think about yours, surely you would not say that it is a normal family. Everyone is extraordinary. The people who work in offices, doing accounts, turn out to be the craziest,” Percy Adlon explained in an interview.

In the 1970s, he met a young dancer, Eleonore, who would become his wife. “Since then I’ve done everything with her, I can’t even say which ideas of our cinema are mine and which are hers,” he admits. Together they founded the film company FILM GmbH in 1978, which endorsed the debut on the big screen of Percy Adlon, as a director and screenwriter, with Céleste , where Eva Mattes played the character alluded to in the title, a woman who, at the outbreak of the Great War, becomes Marcel Proust ‘s maid . He is followed by the valuable The Last Five Days, about the interrogation of Sophie Scholl after handing out pamphlets against the Nazis. For the film, Lena Stolze she won the German Film Award for best actress, and Irm Hermann  for high school, for giving life to a cellmate of the protagonist. With El swing she returns to the First World War, through the adventures of three sisters from a family that has come to less.

Percy Adlon’s career took a turn after discovering Marianne Sägebrecht , who came from cabaret. “When I met her, she had a theater company, and she gave opportunities to young aspirants. She was called the Mother of the Subculture. She did an incredible four-hour stage production with the participation of street people, housewives, dancers, and people from all walks of life, ”she recalls. “She loved how she moves her eyes and fingers when she talks, and how she conveys humor without being funny. Suddenly, he was writing scripts for her. I went to a party one day and there she was floating on her back in the pool, people throwing food at her. Another day she was dancing all night in heels. Both anecdotes led to scenes that appear in our movies.”

In their first work together, Sugarbaby – for many, their best – the actress played a plump undertaker who falls in love with a slender subway train driver (Eisi Gulp). When her girlfriend is away for a few days, she hatches a plan to seduce him. It spawned an American remake, in Christmas TV movie format, Babycakes , with Ricki Lake and Craig Sheffer , who try hard but don’t quite measure up to the shoes of the originals.

The collaboration continued with Adlon’s best-known film, Bagdad Café  (1987), where Sägebrecht plays a woman who fights with her husband in the Mojave desert, so she leaves her car and takes refuge in a local, in the middle of nowhere, populated by peculiar characters, such as a Hollywood set designer, played by the veteran Jack Palance . It became Percy Adlon’s biggest international hit, notably for the title track, Bob Telson ‘s “Calling You,” a classic of movie song compilation records, which garnered an Oscar nomination. Adlon’s trilogy with Sägebrecht concludes with Rosalie goes shopping, which participated in the official section of the 1989 Berlin Film Festival. In this satire of consumer fever, the actress plays a German woman married to an American, obsessed with buying everything she can find in the stores of her small town in Arkansas , beyond his possibilities.

After these works with his muse, the interest in his films decreased. Salmonberries , about the lesbian romance of two new arrivals in Berlin after the fall of the Wall, played by Rosel Zech and KD Lang , still has international repercussions . But Younger and Younger , a boring co-production with the United States, goes unnoticed , since Percy Adlon is not good at filming in English, nor does he cast a male character, Donald Sutherland , as the protagonist this time, who gives life to an unfaithful husband whose wife she takes revenge, through her uncanny ability to appear ever younger and more beautiful. He also shoots a television documentary about the establishment founded by his great-grandfather,The glamorous world of the Hotel Adlon , and the feature films Die Straußkiste, Hawaiian Gardens and Mahler auf der Couch , with which he said goodbye to cinema in 2010.

Settled in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Percy and Eleonore Adlon have a son, Felix Adlon, who began his film career as a camera assistant at Bagdad Café with his father. He later became a screenwriter and director.