He appeared on several provincial stages in Germany and Austria until 1910, and then played in Vienna on various occasions, directed by Josef Jarno until 1921.

In 1907, he founded an initiative (which lasted for one or two years) to play modern Yiddish theatre in German language with Siegfried Schmitz and members of the student club ‘Theodor Herzl’ like Hugo Zuckermann and Oskar Rosenfeld.

In 1919 he was a co-founder, along with Isaak Deutsch, Jacob Mestel, and others, of the Freie Jüdische Volksbühne in Vienna, a Yiddish theatre, which existed until 1922.

[citation needed] In the latter half of the 1920s, he was stage director and leading man for the theatrical troupe headed by Eva Le Gallienne.

In the mid-1930s he appeared in classic horror films The Black Cat, Werewolf of London, The Black Room, Mark of the Vampire and The Devil-Doll, and worked steadily in the espionage films of the 1930s and 1940s, his Slavic accent landing him roles both noble and villainous.