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                                                        Carl Theodor Dreyer
Life
Dreyer was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. His birth mother was an unmarried  maid named Josefine Nilsson, and he was put up for adoption by his birth father, Jens Torp, a married farmer living in Sweden. The first 2 years in his life he lived in orphanages  until his adoption by a typographer named Carl Theodor Dreyer, and his wife, Inger Marie (née Olsen). He was named after his adoptive father, but in the Danish language there is no "Senior" or "Junior" added to names to distinguish them from each other.

Career
As a young man, Dreyer worked as a journalist, but he eventually joined the film industry as a writer of title cards for silent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired by Nordisk Film in 1913.
His first attempts at film direction had limited success, and he left Denmark to work in the French film industry. While living in France he met Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo and other members of the French artistic scene and in 1928 he made his first classic film, The passion of Joan of Ark. Working from the transcripts of Joan's trial, he created a masterpiece of emotion that drew equally on realism and expressionism. Dreyer used private finance from Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg to make his next film as the Danish film industry was in financial ruin. Vampyr (1932) is a surreal meditation on fear. Logic gave way to mood and atmosphere in this story of a man protecting two sisters from a vampire. The movie contains many indelible images, such as the hero, played by de Gunzburg (under the screen name Julian West), dreaming of his own burial and the animal blood lust on the face of one of the sisters as she suffers under the vampire's spell. The film was shot mostly silent but with sparse, cryptic dialogue in three separate versions – English, French and German.