“Erna Morena (1885-1962). Pale, minute, physically not striking. She was often called up to play the role of the rival woman. Her jet black eyes and hair created an unusual contrast with her tense and pale face, evoking a mysterious and ambiguous appearance.
She made her debut in the beginning of the century at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, and her acting career had been burgeoning on stage in the most important German theatres for at least ten years when Eugen Illés asked her to work for the screen. From 1913 onward, and under the same director, Morena acted in a dozen films one after the other, often with Alexander von Antalffy as her partner who a few years later, having moved on to the other side of the camera, called her to act together with Emil Jannings in Wedekind’s Lulu. Also in 1917 she played in the first version of Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, directed by Oswald with Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss, which anticipated the project which a dozen years later Pabst took up again with Louise Brooks. Throughout the silent period, Morena was the leading actress in four to five films a year, directed by Wiene, Murnau (Der Gang in die Nacht), Czerepy, Steinhoff, May (Das indische Grabmal), Franck, Froelich, Boese, Holger-Madsen, Pabst (Man spielt nicht mit der Liebe), Gaston Ravel. Sound cinema did not stop her career, but moved her progressively away from the limelight”. (Vittorio Martinelli)

“I created the stylish lady and the wench. It was always my aim to clearly outline the border between these two worlds. My artistic objective was to achieve the greatest effect with the least means. The three-dimensional aspect of film and its potential, to be able to shape those thousand fine nuances of movement (from which the character then emerges visually, quite complete and quite different to the theatre), that is what most attracted me about film”. (Erna Morena, in Hermann Treuner (Hg.), Filmkünstler. Wir über uns selbst, 1928)