Brother Theodore Movies and Career Information

Brother Theodore (11 November 1906 – 5 April 2001), born Theodore Gottlieb, was a German-American monologuist and comedian known for rambling, stream-of-consciousness dialogues which he called "stand-up tragedy". He was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, where his father was a magazine publisher. Theodore attended the University of Cologne. At age 32, under Nazi rule, he was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until he signed over his family's fortune for one Reichsmark. After being deported for chess hustling from Switzerland he went to Austria where Albert Einstein, a family friend and alleged lover of his mother, helped him escape to the United States. He worked as a janitor at Stanford University, where he demonstrated his prowess at chess by beating thirty professors simultaneously, and later became a dockworker in San Francisco. He played a bit part in Orson Welles's 1946 movie The Stranger. This was one of the several movie appearances he made beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1990s. These were mostly small parts in B-movies, although he did provide the voice of Gollum in the 1977 made-for-television animated version