Adele Sandrock, born August 19, 1863, in Rotterdam, made her stage debut at Hoftheater Meiningen in 1879 and performed at theatres in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. Sandrock made her breaktrough-performance as Iza in Dumas' "Der Fall Clemenceau" at Theater an der Wien in 1889. For the next five years, she was a cast member of Deutsches Volkstheater and played a guest performance in New York.

In 1895, she made her Burgtheater debut as Maria Stuart. In the following years, she became famous as a great tragic actress in classic roles and modern plays, for example by Arthur Schnitzler, a friend of Sandrock's. But during her engagement at Deutsches Theater in Berlin from 1905 to 1910, Sandrock did not get along with Reinhardt's new approach to theatre but learned how to use her out-dated way of playing, for example in Wilde's "Bunbury" at Volksbühne where she played the weird old lady – to the theatregoers' delight – in a deadly serious manner full of old pathos, in traditional diction, and with a sonorous manner of speaking.

This manner of acting and speaking paved the way for her second and more popular career: after her movie debut in "Marianne, ein Weib aus dem Volk" in 1911, she completely focussed on movie parts from 1919 on. In more than 100 films, Sandrock cultivated her image as bossy dame and coined the typology of the regal and relentlessly egocentric grandmother and mother-in-law in German cinema. Georg Jacoby, Carl Boese and E.W. Emo, directors of commercial entertainment movies, most likely cast her for their films.

Sandrock was rarely able to play a more sensitive character like a stricken bereaved in Ucickys national naval war drama "Morgenrot" (Dawn). Later, Sandrock became "Aunt Sadele" who bullied everyone around her in film, theatre, and real life with sardonic one-liners. One of her most successful roles was the part of theatre-obsessed Pauline Neuber in Georg Zoch's "Alles hört auf mein Kommando" (1934). On August 30, 1937, Adele Sandrock died 16 months after an accident in Berlin and was later buried in Vienna.