In fact, his true aspiration was directing. "Blind Husbands" (1919) provided Stroheim with a successful debut--he not only directed, but wrote, designed the sets and starred. The film earned him a reputation as a master of physical detail and psychological sophistication flavored by a European sensibility. "The Devil's Passkey" (1920) and "Foolish Wives" (1922) also amplified his reputation for tales of adultery, as well as spendthrift production. To the Hollywood establishment, Stroheim's most annoying trait was his penchant for lengthy, psychologically intricate movies, and he invariably fell afoul of studio editing and interference. "Foolish Wives" was reduced by a third, and he was fired from "Merry-Go-Round" (1923) by Universal production chief Irving Thalberg. In perhaps the most famous case of a mangled masterpiece, Stroheim filmed Frank Norris's novel "McTeague" in obsessive detail, producing a 9 1/2 hour masterwork, "Greed" (1925). The horrified studio forced the director to cut the film, but that version was still over 4 hours, so the film was taken out of Stroheim's hands and given first to director Rex Ingram and eventually to editor June Mathis, who pruned it to its present 140-minute running time. Search for the missing footage spawned a virtual cottage industry among devoted archivists and Stroheim devotees.

Hired by MGM to direct the operetta "The Merry Widow" (1925), Stroheim perversely adapted it as a black comedy, replete with the sadism of the decadent Hapsburg empire. He returned to the same subject for "The Wedding March" (1928), a film so long it had to be released in two parts--the second part called "The Honeymoon" in Europe. As brilliant as Stroheim's films were, he seemed willfully ignorant of the havoc his painstaking and expensive production methods wreaked in his relations with financial backers. His most profligate escapade was with Joseph P. Kennedy's money, on the Gloria Swanson vehicle "Queen Kelly" (1928). Stroheim's high-handedness also failed to endear him to stars, and Swanson fired him from the picture, which was never completed, although a "reconstructed" version was issued in 1985. Stroheim's directing career virtually ended with the swashbuckling silent era, as sound and budget-conscious production changed the tenor of filmmaking.

In the 1930s, with the Germans once again on the march, Stroheim returned to acting the horrible Hun. As the commandant of the POW camp in Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion" (1937), his disdainful demeanor, complete with monocle, would stand as an indelible symbol of the tragic decline of the European aristocracy. Although typecast, he did seem the only actor to inhabit that persona, and it was used with particularly poignant effect in "Sunset Boulevard" (1950). By his death in 1957, he had become an icon of another era, one whose image he had helped create by living up to his self-imposed "von."