[1] An erudite child with an early interest in film, Murnau eventually studied philology and art before director Max Reinhardt recruited him to his acting school.

[2] Murnau's first directorial work premiered in 1919, but he did not attain international recognition until the 1922 film Nosferatu, an adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.

His mother, Otilie Volbracht, was the second wife of his father, Heinrich Plumpe (1847–1914), an owner of a cloth factory in the northwest part of Germany.

[9][1] Murnau studied philology at the University in Berlin and later art history and literature in Heidelberg, where director Max Reinhardt saw him at a students' performance and decided to invite him to his actor-school.

[6] He then joined the Imperial German Flying Corps and flew missions in northern France as a combat pilot for two years,[10][11][12] surviving eight crashes without severe injuries.

[13] After World War I ended, Murnau returned to Germany, where he soon established his own film studio with actor Conrad Veidt.

He explored the theme of dual personalities, much like Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in Der Janus-Kopf (1920) starring Veidt and featuring Bela Lugosi.

[14] Murnau's best known film is Nosferatu (1922), an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), starring German stage actor Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok.

[15] Murnau also directed The Last Laugh (German: Der letzte Mann, (The Last Man), 1924), written by Carl Mayer (a very prominent figure of the Kammerspielfilm movement) and starring Emil Jannings.

Unlike expressionist films, Kammerspielfilme are categorized by their chamber play influence, involving a lack of intricate set designs and story lines / themes regarding social injustice towards the working classes.

[16][9][17] Murnau's last German film was the big budget Faust (1926) with Gösta Ekman as the title character, Emil Jannings as Mephisto and Camilla Horn as Gretchen.

Murnau immigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), a movie often cited by scholars as one of the greatest of all time.

[18] Released in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system (music and sound effects only), Sunrise was not a financial success, but received several Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.

[23] In late 1927, Murnau convinced Rollins to pose nude, with the pool and garden of the Wolf's Lair castle in Hollywood serving as the backdrop.

[24] On March 10, 1931, a week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau drove up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles, California, in a rented Packard touring car.

Murnau's valet, Eliazar Garcia Stevenson (September 2, 1900 – October 4, 1985),[25] swerved to avoid a truck that unexpectedly veered into the northbound lane.

Symphony (AT 2022) is based on the theft of Murnau's head: the skull stolen from the film director's Berlin tomb in 2015 becomes the anchor of a narrative which splices fictional and historical identities.