Most nations have a history, Hungarians have Fate. If you want first-hand experience of what this means, go to YouTube and listen to Katalin Karády’s melancholy chanson ‘Smouldering cigarette end’ (Hamvadó cigarettavég).  A low decadent voice full of eroticism, a woman in her late twenties with a seductive appearance, who sent men crazy and even made well-brought up ladies become maniacal followers of fashion. The male victims of this femme fatale included a taxation officer thirty years older than herself who became her first and only husband. Her real great love was the Gestapo’s top wanted person and the head of Hungarian military intelligence during World War II. 

Born in 1910 as the seventh child of a messy working-class family, her first and utmost ambition was to get out of poverty and her terror of her father, a compulsive gambler on the horses.  His name, Kanczler. was too German-sounding for a media career in Hungary and it was her lucky star, Zoltán Egyed, an influential journalist, who “invented” her as an actress and who later became her impresario. In 1938 he suggested she Hungarianize her name to Karády; he created her image as an actress. After a mediocre debut on stage she burst onto the film scene a year later becoming a celebrity almost overnight with the film “Deadly Spring” (Halálos tavasz), not a film of particular artistic value, one of a dozen the Budapest film studios produced in assembly line fashion. The film went almost unnoticed, but thanks to the very influential Catholic Church it became a box-office hit. What inspired the clerics to brand it immoral and detrimental to Christian young people and family values was the not so subtle eroticism Karády produced.

The defenders of pure morals were right in this case. Like Marilyn Monroe, she broke sexual taboos. Contrary to the typical female film figures of the day she appeared not as a dumb, sentimental character but a flesh and blood seducer, smoking a cigarette and even wearing trousers. She immediately created fashion, her hairstyle was imitated by hundreds of thousands, her hats became extremely trendy and Karády Fan Clubs were set up all over the country, their members recognized by the Karády collar on their dress.

Her career came to an end abruptly after the German occupation of the country in 1944 when the Gestapo held her for months, interrogating her about her connections with pro-Ally contacts, especially István Újszászy, Admiral Horthy’s close associate and head of military intelligence. Unlike her brief marriage and countless love affairs her relationship with Újszászy, a most intelligent and handsome man, was not only passionate but fatal as well. He was arrested the same day as Karády, and later released only to be captured by the Russian army eight months later. She never recovered from the loss of her fiancé. She used her contact with Újszászy to save Jews by organizing their release and hiding them in her villas, of which she had many. In 2004 the Israeli Government awarded her the title of Righteous Person.

After the war she was neglected as an actress. The new communist elite saw her as the representative of a bygone era. Not finding her role under the new regime she decided to flee the country in 1951, leaving everything behind including relatives who were persecuted because of her defection. She settled in Brazil, as at the height of Cold War hysteria in the US she was not granted an American visa. Only 17 years later was she allowed to settle in New York where she ran a fashionable hat shop and lived as a recluse until her death in 1990. She was adamant that she should maintain her legend and never allowed herself to be photographed. Even when her nostalgic revival was at its height in Hungary in the 1980s she still refused to return to Hungary.