He was born Wilhelm Egon Fritz Fritsch, the only son of a factory owner in Kattowitz (present-day Katowice) in the Prussian province of Silesia.

His career was pushed now through the UFA film company by being cast as a juvenile lover in silent comedies such as Chaste Susanne (1926), The Last Waltz (1927), Hungarian Rhapsody (1928), and Her Dark Secret (1929).

In his musical comedies, Fritsch also turned out to be a good singer performing popular German film songs written by Werner Richard Heymann or Friedrich Holländer.

In the mid-1930s, he was the leading actor in highly successful comedies such as Amphitryon (1935) directed by Reinhold Schünzel or Lucky Kids (1936, director Paul Martin), the latter a German adaption of Frank Capra's film It Happened One Night.

Though he had joined the NSDAP in response to the pressure put on him to do so, Fritsch avoided getting involved in Nazi propaganda, other than his appearance in the 1944 aviator movie Junge Adler [de] which earned him an entry on Goebbels' Gottbegnadeten list.

In 1958, Fritsch starred in the German version of Mit Eva fing die Sünde an [de], which was later adapted and filled with additional scenes by Francis Ford Coppola for his debut release of The Bellboy And The Playgirls (1962).

After the screening, cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), under the alias "Emmanuelle Mimieux", comments on liking Lilian Harvey in the film—to which an irritated Goebbels angrily insists her name never be mentioned again in his presence.