Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a German film director.
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Where did FW Murnau die?
On March 10, 1931, a week to the premiere of the film Tabu, Murnau drove up the Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles, California in a hired Packard touring car.
Murnau’s valet, Eliazar Garcia Stevenson swerved to avoid a truck that unexpectedly veered into the northbound lane.
The car overturned after striking an embankment, throwing all occupants out of the vehicle. Murnau suffered a head injury and died the next day at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, in Califonia.
Why did FW Murnau leave Germany?
FW Murnau left Germany because of an offer he received from William Fox in 1925 to work in Hollywood.
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Murnau emigrated 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.
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. In winning the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production it shared what is now the Best Picture award with the movie Wings.
When and where did FW Murnau live?
Murnau lived in Germany from 1889 to 1917. He moved to Switzerland and returned in 1919.
Murnau arrived in California in early July 1926 and stayed there, except for a few months back in Berlin in 1927, until mid-May 1929.
It was then that he sailed for Tahiti to shoot his last movie, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), returning to California by October 1930. A few months later, on March 11, 1931, he died from the injuries he suffered from a car accident.
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