After wanting to join the Marine as a teenager, when he graduated from high school he enrolled at the Law Faculty in Bucharest and at the Dramatic Arts Conservatory, which he graduated from in 1929, as a way of satisfying both his parents’s wish of him becoming a lawyer and his own passion for the theatre.
Here, he is noticed by Lucia Sturdza Bulandra, who offers him the chance of making his stage debut at the theatre she runs. He plays numerous parts on the stages of Bucharest theatres until 1948, when he joins the Municipal Theatre, which will later become the Bulandra Theatre. In 1950 he makes his film debut with the part of the Engineer Taşcă in Life Wins. He generally plays secondary or episodic characters, aside from the part of senator Varga from The Conspiracy and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.
Fory Etterle on the acting craft:
"The fundamental issue for an actor is that everything he does has to be simple and natural. The viewers shouldn’t have to be aware of the production effort behind. Don’t give the impression that you’ve reached the end of your physical and artistic resources. Sweat is of no interest to anyone, no one cares how much work you’ve put into a part or what means you’ve employed. What matters is the end result. And there is another issue which concerns the actors of my generation: not giving the impression that you are the product of a different acting school, accommodating to a film in which young people are co-starring and that your performance blend with the others’. It’s a matter of style. You’re practically not allowed to be a slave to a certain style. You have to own it, naturally, but you also have to refresh it. And just like it’s a fact that young people have things to learn from their elders, the opposite is equally true. (
1973, interview by Eva Sîrbu)
