Lil Dagover
Lil Dagover (30 September 1887 – January 23, 1980) was a German stage, film and television actress whose career spanned nearly six decades.
Early life
Lil Dagover was born Marie Antonia Siegelinde Martha Liletts in Madiun, Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to German parents. Her father, Adolf Karl Ludwig Moritz Seubert, born in Karlsruhe/Baden Germany, was a forest ranger in the service of the Dutch colonial authorities. When she was ten, her parents sent her back to Europe to continue her education in boarding schools in Baden-Baden, Weimar and Geneva, Switzerland. Orphaned at the age of 13, she spent the rest of her adolescence with friends and relatives.
After completing her education she began pursuing a career as a stage actress around the principal cities of Europe. In 1917 she married actor Fritz Daghofer, who was twenty-five years her senior. The couple divorced in 1919 and the union produced a daughter, Eva Marie, born the year of the divorce. Seubert began using a variant of her ex-husband's surname as a professional moniker – changing the spelling of 'Daghofer' to 'Dagover'.