Biography
Theo Frenkel made more than 220 films between 1908 and 1925, but only a few have survived, making it impossible properly to assess his artistic importance. He was a director on a European scale, producing a vast body of work spanning Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Frenkel preferred to call himself Theo Bouwmeester after his mother, who came from a well-known theatrical family in the Netherlands. Before entering the film industry, he worked as a stage actor in many countries. He directed his first film in Cecil Hepworth's filmstudio in Walton-on-Thames (England) in 1908. He soon had his own troupe of actors and made more than fifty pictures in a variety of genres, mostly writing the scripts himself. In 1910 he became head of Charles Urban's studio's in Hove near Brighton (UK) and in Nice (France), where he directed more than 120 films in two years, many of them in colour, using one of the earliest colour systems, Kinemacolor. To enhance the spectacle aspect of his films, he selected stories that demanded glamorous costumes and monumental landscapes, like Greek myths, biblical tales and historical romances. Frenkel cast his first wife Julie Meijer (1878-1963) in many leading roles and he himself seized every opportunity to appear with her in front of the camera. These films never made a profit, however, and Frenkel had to move on. He worked for the British Pathé studios in 1912, moved to Berlin in 1913, and finally returned to neutral Holland at the outbreak of the World War I. In his own country he was one of the most experienced directors at the time, and he waisted no time creating several sensational dramas such as Het wrak van de Noordzee (The Wreck of the North Sea, 1915), Genie tegen geweld (Genius Against Violence, 1916) and Pro domo (1918). After the war, Frenkel returned to Berlin to direct German-Dutch co-productions such as Alexandra (1922) and Frauenmoral (1923), but his international career was over. Since the Netherlands could not support his ambitions either, he retired from film-making in 1925, only returning to direct his last feature in 1928.
