About Lya De Putti
De Putti came to America in February 1926. At the time, she told reporters she was 22 years old but her ocean liner's records list her as having been 26. De Putti generally was cast as a vamp character, and often wore her dark hair short in a style similar to that of Louise Brooks or Colleen Moore. De Putti starred in D.W. Griffith's The Sorrows of Satan (1926). The film was released in two versions, one shown in the U.S. and the other in Europe. In the U.S. version, one scene had de Putti fully dressed whereas the same scene in the European release had de Putti topless.
The following year, de Putti went to Hollywood but found little success. Despite working with distinguished actors such as Adolphe Menjou and Zasu Pitts, she failed to make it big and left the screen by 1929 to attempt to restart her career on Broadway.
Later, she went to England to make silent movies and studied the English language. She then returned to the U.S. to attempt sound films.
On 5 March 1926 the Ogden Standard Examiner published a story alleging that de Putti had attempted suicide by jumping out of her apartment window at the Wilmersdorf quarters. She and her lover of one year, who was also an actor, had been arguing prior to the attempt. One of her arms and a foot was broken as a result of the fall. de Putti later claimed that she was saying goodbye to friends when she leaned too far over the railing and fell.
In November 1927, de Putti was injured when she fell down the stairs and through a window. Some press accounts speculated that it was another suicide attempt, but de Putti denied this.
In 1913, she married Zoltán Szepessy de Négyes, a county magistrate who was 10 years her senior. The couple had two daughters, Ilona (born 1914) and Judit (born 1916). Upon divorcing in 1918, Szepessy told their two daughters that their mother had died; there was even a headstone in a Hungarian cemetery that bore the inscription 'Lya de Putti - died 1920'. On 8 March 1932, Szepessy committed suicide in a Budapest hotel due to financial difficulties and grief over de Putti's death; it wasn't until his death that Ilona and Judit learned about their mother's true fate.
She remarried in 1922 to Louis Jahnke, a Norwegian diplomat. Prior to Jahnke, she was married to the Norwegian merchant Ludwig Christensen, who left her widowed when he died of tuberculosis in 1922.
In the late 1920s, de Putti met banker Walter D. Blumenthal. They began a relationship, and de Putti fell in love and wanted to marry him. His family did not allow the marriage, however, which resulted in de Putti going on a hunger strike in 1931.
De Putti once was rumored to be engaged to Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, a former husband of oil heiress Millicent Rogers. She denied the engagement.
De Putti nearly died in August 1930 when the small plane she was flying in crashed. In 1931, she was hospitalized to have a chicken bone removed from her throat. De Putti contracted a throat infection, and was taken to the Harbor Sanitarium, then located at 667 Madison Avenue, where reportedly she behaved irrationally and eluded her nurses. Eventually, she was found in a corridor. She developed pleurisy in her right side, followed by pneumonia in both lungs.
Lya de Putti died at 1:05 A.M. on 27 November 1931, aged 34, at the Harbor Sanitorium, leaving just $1,100 and a few bits of jewelry. She is interred in the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Spouses
Louis Jahnke(1922 - November 27, 1931) (her death)
Zoltan Szepessy(1912 - 1918) (divorced, 2 children)
Ludwig Christensen(? - 1922) (his death)
