George is noted for having spooked the young Bertolt Brecht in his first directing job, a production of Arnolt Bronnen's Parricide (1922), when he refused to continue working with the director.

[2] In 1923 he founded the Schauspielertheater with fellow actors Elisabeth Bergner and Alexander Granach in order to be able to work more independently as an artist.

[3] He worked with theatre director Erwin Piscator and playwright Bertolt Brecht, both of whom identified with the political left.

[1] After the Nazi takeover, George was classified as a "non-desirable" actor at first because of his earlier political affiliations and was thus barred from working in cinematic productions.

In 1937, George was designated as a Staatsschauspieler (i.e. an actor of national importance) and in 1938 was appointed director of the Schiller Theater in Berlin.

As director, he hired artists who were considered "non-desirable" including the art historian Wilhelm Fraenger (a communist), the Catholic actor Robert Müller, and the graphic artist Karl Rössing (a communist who converted to the NSDAP) and his student Günther Strupp.

"[4] Cooke and Silberman describe him as "the actor most closely tied with fascist fantasies of the autocratic and the populist leader".

On 14 May 1945, according to his wife, George was arrested for the first time by Soviet officers with the words "He won't stay long" and was released the next day.

On 31 May George received a certificate from the mayor of Charlottenburg stating that he was not allowed to be involved in clean-up work "as he must be available to the authorities for questioning at any time".

At the beginning of June, the Soviet city commander Nikolai Berzarin issued him a letter of protection which appeared in his KGB file as a "passport" confiscated during his last arrest.

A Lieutenant Bibler reported to his boss Pyrin on 28 July 1945 that George was “one of the most respected fascist artists" who "contributed to the continuation of the war through his pro-fascist agitation in radio and newspapers".

On 22 September, during preliminary rehearsals for a dramatization of the ballad Death of Tiberius, George went to the internal medicine outpatient clinic, according to a fellow prisoner.

The death certificate, signed by Soviet and German doctors, shows the diagnosis as "laparotomy, bronchopneumonia, cardiac atrophy."

Ernst Legal suggested actress Berta Drews for the role based on her work as Adelhaid at Reinhardt-Schule.