Death
A week prior to the opening of the film Tabu, Murnau had driven up the coast from Los Angeles, California in a hired Rolls Royce.
The young and inexpert driver, who was a 14-year-old Philippine servant, crashed the car against an electric pole. Murnau hit his head and died in a hospital shortly afterwards, in nearby Santa Barbara, and therefore did not live to see the premiere of his last film.
Murnau was entombed in Southwest Cemetery in Stahnsdorf (Südwest-Kirchhof Stahnsdorf) near Berlin. Only 11 people attended the funeral. Among them were Robert Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy. Garbo also commissioned a death mask of Murnau, which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.
Read more about this topic: F. W. Murnau
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“You listen to artists fighting with each other, competing to the death like gladiators, in order to see who is going to get into a show, who is going to make it, who isn’t: who is going to get a full-page ad and who is going to get a half-page. Then I think, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to go off somewhere and just do your work?””
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“Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Now they heap the funeral pyre,
And the torch of death they light;
Ah! ‘tis hard to die by fire!”
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