Because of his heavy generically "European" accent and Slavic-sounding surname .
As a result of his expressive face he was predestined to play scoundrels, pimps and bad guys.
He died of pneumonia in Sussex, England, on January 27, 1978, just three months after the death of his fourth wife, actress Joan Tetzel.
After serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I, Oscar Homolka learned his trade at the academy of music and performing arts between 1915 and 1917. After that he made his debut at the Komdienhaus Vienna. Success there led to work in the much more prestigious German theatrical community in Munich where in 1924 he played Mortimer in the premiere of Brechts play The Life of Edward II of England at the Munich Kammerspiele, and since 1925 in Berlin where he worked under Max Reinhardt.
In 1967 Homolka was awarded the Filmband in Gold of the Deutscher Filmpreis for outstanding contributions to German cinema.
After the arrival of National Socialism in Germany, Homolka - although not Jewish - moved to Britain where he starred in the films Rhodes, Empire Builder, with Walter Huston, 1936; and Everything Is Thunder, with Constance Bennett, 1936.
His first wife was Grete Mosheim, a German actress of Jewish ancestry on her fathers side. They married in Berlin on June 28, 1928, but divorced in 1937. She later married Howard Gould. His second wife, Baroness Vally Hatvany (died 1938), was a Hungarian actress. They married in December 1937, but she died four months later.
Other stage plays in which Homolka performed: The first German performance of Eugene ONeills The Emperor Jones, 1924.
In 1939, Homolka married socialite and photographer Florence Meyer (1911-1962), a daughter of The Washington Post owner, Eugene Meyer.
His career in television included appearances in several episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents in 1957 and 1960.
Oskar Homolka made his home in England after 1966.
He acted with Ingrid Bergman in Rage in Heaven, with Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, with Ronald Reagan in Prisoner of War and with Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman of Chaillot.
In 1973, he appeared in Border Line an episode of The Protectors filmed in Austria.
According to Homolkas own account, he made at least thirty silent films in Germany and starred in the first talking picture ever made there.
Although he didnt possess a polished pronunciation he could assert himself in the sound film era and continue to haunt.
Homolka fled in 1933 to Paris, then London where his career soon resumed on the stage and in film. Soon thereafter he was invited to the United States where he spent most of the next 14 years as a character actor, generally playing a cruel or bumbling European whose thick accent and thicker eyebrows were the key defining attributes.
In 1935 Homolka emigrated to England and wrote his first name with "c" from now on.
In 1951 he returned to Austria to play the village judge Adam in the play: The Broken Jug by Kleist during the Salzburg Festival. His partner -as wife Marthe Rull- was Therese Giehse, the performance was subsequently shown at the Vienna Burgtheater.
Predictably, Hollywood loved him most as the blustering Uncle Chris in I Remember Mama. In a 1944 New Yorker profile Homolka is quoted thus, "In Europe I played Othello, but in American pictures.... I am just the mean fellow who leers at the little heroine and dies hideously in the end." Howard Hawks, thankfully, showed us another side of Homolka when he cast him in Ball of Fire as the pipe-sucking Professor Gurkakoff, one of eight hermetic encyclopedia writers childishly lovestruck by Barbara Stanwycks nightclub singer, Sugarpuss OShea.
In spite of a performance he did complete drunken in Munich in 1924 - he staggered more over the stage than the spotlights and the famous critic Ihering wrote about this: It was the most impertinent entrance I have ever seen" - he became an engagement in Berlin.
He returned to England in the mid-1960s, to play the Soviet KGB Colonel Stok in Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain , opposite Michael Caine. His last film was the Blake Edwards romantic drama The Tamarind Seed in 1974.
He played Adolf Verloc in two adaptations of the 1907 novel "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad : Sabotage , in which the character was named Karl Anton Verloc, and "Startime" (1959/II) {The Secret Agent } .
