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- Born the fourth of six children to Austrian customs officer Alois Hitler--who had been married twice before--and the former Klara Polzl, Adolf Hitler grew up in a small Austrian town in the late 19th century. He was a slow learner and did poorly in school. He was frequently beaten by his authoritarian father. Things got worse when Adolf's older brother, Alois Jr., ran away from home. His mild-mannered mother occasionally tried to shield him, but was ineffectual. Adolf's attempt to run away at 11 was unsuccessful. At the age of 14 he was freed when his hated father died - an event that he did not mourn.
Hitler dropped out of high school at age 16 and went to Vienna, where he strove to become an artist, but was refused twice by the Vienna Art Academy. By this time Hitler had become an ardent German nationalist--although he was not German but Austrian--and when World War I broke out, he crossed into Germany and joined a Bavarian regiment in the German army. He was assigned as a message runner but also saw combat. Temporarily blinded after a gas attack in Flanders in 1918, he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and was promoted from private to corporal. In 1918, when the war ended, Hitler stayed in the army and was posted to the Intelligence division. He was assigned to spy on several radical political parties that were considered a threat to the German government. One such organization was the German Workers' Party. Hitler was drawn by party founder Dietrich Eckart, a morphine addict who propagated doctrines of mysticism and anti-Semitism. Hitler soon joined the party with the help of his military intelligence ties. He became party spokesman in 1919, renamed it the National Socalist German Workers Party (NSDAP/NAZI) and declared himself its Führer (leader) one year later. In 1920 Hitler's intelligence handler, Munich-based colonel named Karl Haushofer, introduced the swastika insignia. In 1921 Haushofer founded the paramilitary Storm Troopers ("Sturmabteilung", or SA), composed of German veterans of WWI and undercover military intelligence officers. They helped Hitler to organize a coup attempt--the infamous "beer hall putsch"--against the Bavarian government in Munich in 1923, but it failed. The "rebels" marched on Munich's city hall, which was cordoned off by police. Hitler's men fired at the police and missed; the police fired back and didn't, resulting in several of Hitler's fellow Nazis being shot dead. Hitler himself was arrested, convicted of treason and sent to prison. During his prison time he was coached by his advisers and dictated his book "Mein Kampf" ("My Struggle") to his deputy Rudolf Hess. He only served several months in prison before being released. By 1925 the Nazi party was in much better straits both organizationally and financially, as it had secured the backing of a large group of wealthy conservative German industrialists, who funneled huge amounts of money into the organization. Hitler was provided with a personal bodyguard unit named the "Schutzstaffel", better known as the SS. The Nazis began to gain considerable support in Germany through their network of army and WWI veterans, and Hitler ran for President in 1931. Defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler next attempted to become Chancellor of Germany. Through under-the-table deals with powerful conservative businessmen and right-wing politicians, Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January 1933. One month later, a mysterious fire--which the Nazis claimed had been started by "terrorists" but was later discovered to have been set by the Nazis themselves--destroyed the Reichstag (the building housing the German parliament). Then Hitler's machine began to issue a series of emergency decrees that gave the office of Chancellor more and more power.
In March of 1933 Hitler persuaded the German parliament to pass the Enabling Act, which made the Chancellor dictator of Germany and gave him more power than the President. Two months later Hitler began "cleaning house"; he abolished trade unions and ordered mass arrests of members of rival political groups. By the end of 1933 the Nazi Party was the only one allowed in Germany. In June of 1934 Hitler turned on his own and ordered the purge of the now radical SA--that he now saw as a potential threat to his power--which was led by one of his oldest friends, a thug and street brawler named Ernst Röhm. Röhm's ties to Hitler counted for nothing, as Hitler ordered him assassinated. Soon President Hindenburg died, and Hitler merged the office of President with the office of Chancellor. In 1935 the anti-Jewish Nuremburg laws were passed on Hitler's authorization. A year later, with Germany now under his total control, he sent troops into the Rhineland, which was a violation of the World War I Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 he forced the union of Austria with Germany and also took the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia near the German border with a large ethnic German population, on the pretext of "protecting" the German population from the Czechs. In March 1939 Hitler overran the rest of Czechoslovakia. On 23 August 1939 Hitler and Joseph Stalin made a non-aggression treaty. In September of 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. France and the British Commonwealth and Empire declared war on Germany. In 1940 Germany occupied Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, and launched a major offensive against France. Paris fell and France surrendered, after which Hitler considered invading the UK. However, after the German Air Force was defeated in the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled. The British had begun bombing German cities in May 1940, and four months later Hitler retaliated by ordering the Blitz. In 1941 German troops assisted Italy, which under dictator Benito Mussolini was a German ally, in its takeover of Yugoslavia and Greece. Meanwhile, in Germany and the occupied countries, a program of mass extermination of Jews had begun.
On June 22, 1941, German forces invaded the Soviet Union. In addition to more than 4,000,000 German troops, there were additional forces from German allies Romania, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Finland, among others. Hitler used multinational forces in order to save Germans for the future colonization of the Russian lands. Following the detailed Nazi plan, code-named "Barbarossa," Hitler was utilizing resources of entire Europe under Nazi control to feed the invasion of Russia. Three groups of Nazi armies invaded Russia: Army Group North besieged Leningrad for 900 days, Army Group Center reached Moscow and Army Group South occupied Ukraine, reached Caucasus and Stalingrad. After a series of initial successes, however, the German Armies were stopped at Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad. Leningrad was besieged by the Nazis for 900 days until the city of 4,000,000 virtually starved itself to death. Only in January of 1944 was Marshal Georgi Zhukov able to finally defeat the German forces and liberate the city, finally lifting the siege after a cost of some 2,000,000 lives. In 1943 several major battles occurred at Kursk (which became the largest tank battle in history), Kharkov and Stalingrad, all of which the Germans lost. The battle for Stalingrad was one of the largest in the history of mankind. At Stalingrad alone the Germans lost 360,000 troops, in addition to the losses suffered by Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, Croatian and other forces, but the Russians lost over one million men. By 1944--the same year the Western allies invaded occupied Europe--Germany was retreating on both fronts and its forces in Africa had been completely defeated, resulting in the deaths and/or surrender of several hundred thousand troops. Total human losses during the six years of war were estimated at 60,000,000, of which 27,000,000 were Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and other people in Soviet territory. Germany lost over 11,000,000 soldiers and civilians. Poland and Yugoslavia lost over 3,000,000 people each. Italy and France lost over 1,000,000 each. Most nations of Central and Eastern Europe suffered severe--and in some cases total--economic destruction.
Hitler's ability to act as a figurehead of the Nazi machine was long gone by late 1944. Many of his closest advisers and handlers had already fled to other countries, been imprisoned and/or executed by the SS for offenses both real--several assassination attempts on Hitler--and imagined, or had otherwise absented themselves from Hitler's inner circle. For many years Hitler was kept on drugs by his medical personnel. In 1944 a group of German army officers and civilians pulled off an almost successful assassination attempt on Hitler, but he survived. Hitler, by the beginning of 1945, was a frail, shaken man who had almost totally lost touch with reality. The Russians reached Berlin in April of that year and began a punishing assault on the city. As their forces approached the bunker where Hitler and the last vestiges of his government were holed up, Hitler killed himself. Just a day earlier he had married his longtime mistress Eva Braun. Hitler's corpse was taken to Moscow and later shown to Allied Army Commanders and diplomats. Joseph Stalin showed Hitler's personal items to Winston Churchill and Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam Conference after the victory. Hitler's personal gun was donated to the museum of the West Point Military Academy in New York. Some of his personal items are now part of the permanent collection at the National History Museum in Moscow, Russia. - Actor
- Additional Crew
On the cast list of The Magnificent Seven (1960), you will find several names that doubtless you know well: Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, and Yul Brynner. But there is one name that you will have difficulty pronouncing, let alone identifying as an actor you have seen before. That man is Horst Buchholz, and he was one of the few German actors to have a considerable success in both Hollywood and in Europe. One would hardly guess that he was sought out to act in one of the most famous films of all time, only to have to turn it down.
Horst Buchholz was born in Berlin, Germany, in the year 1933. His father was a German shoemaker, while his mother was born to Danish parents. Buccholz was put in a foster home in Czechoslovakia when World War II broke out in Europe, but he returned to Berlin the moment he had the chance. Realizing his talent in acting, Buchholz dropped out of school to perfect his acting skills. After moving from East Berlin to West Berlin, he became well-known for his work in theatre and on the radio. In 1952 he turned to film, and after a series of small roles, he found a larger one in the Julien Duvivier film Marianne of My Youth (1955). He was praised for his role in the romantic/drama film Sky Without Stars (1955) by Helmut Käutner, but it was the lead role in the comedic Confessions of Felix Krull (1957) that made him an established German actor.
He followed this breakthrough role with the romantic film Two Worlds (1958) and the thriller Wet Asphalt (1958), where the handsome young actor plays a former criminal who associates himself with a journalist. Now a familiar face in his country, Buchholz pursued making foreign films. His first non-German film was the British film Tiger Bay (1959). The film is about a girl who witnesses a seaman named Korchinsky (Buchholz) murder his girlfriend. The film won praise in both Germany and Britain, but it was Buchholz' next foreign film that secured his name in the history of classic films. This film was the epic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) directed by John Sturges. Buchholz played Chico, the inexperienced Mexican youth that wants to be a gunman and abandon his past. Buchholz starred alongside such legends as Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner. both of whom had strong European roots. The film was a hit, first in Europe, then was re-distributed in the States to a much higher profit. The film gained massive popularity, and even now is treasured as a classic.
Buchholz could now find good and steady work nationally and internationally, which is something few actors could do at the time. He worked on the romantic film Fanny (1961), which is based on a trilogy of plays written by legendary writer Marcel Pagnol. Buchholz plays the role of Marius, a passionate but unsure youth who must choose between the girl he loves, and the life at sea he has always wanted. The film was a fine success, nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Charles Boyer (who plays Buchholz' onscreen father).
It was at this point in his film career where he was sought as the first choice to play the role of Sherif Ali in David Lean's legendary film Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, Buchholz had to turn it down, as he had already signed up for another film, which turned out to be the Oscar-nominated comedy One, Two, Three (1961) (directed by Billy Wilder). The film was once again a fine success to add to Buchholz' career, but ultimately gained nowhere near as much of a status as David Lean's film. Buchholz also made the Italian film The Empty Canvas (1963) in which he plays an untalented artist who begins a love affair with a young model. Throughout his in the early 60s, Buchholz had made a name for himself, acting in one Oscar-nominated film after another and showing off his talent as an actor. However, the success he had reached was not to last.
Buchholz continued with film, including the James Bond spoof That Man in Istanbul (1965) and the crime film Johnny Banco (1967). He starred in the B-movie failure that was The Young Rebel (1967). Buchholz rebounded with the fiery film The Saviour (1971) in which he plays a man who claims to be organizing resistance against the Nazis. He also played Johann Strauss in the Golden Globe-nominated musical The Great Waltz (1972). which was sadly another failure.
The rest of the 1970s and the early 1980s were spent mostly on television and movies released for television, whether it be foreign (Dead of Night (1977), Return to Fantasy Island (1978)) or German (Derrick). Buchholz found mild success again when he returned to the big screen with the WW II espionage film Code Name: Emerald (1985) in which he plays alongside such stars as Ed Harris and Max von Sydow. After this film, Buchholz returned to European movies, such as And the Violins Stopped Playing (1988) in which a group of gypsies flee Nazi persecutors. After taking a supporting role in the fantasy film Faraway, So Close! (1993), Buchholz acted in one of his most well known films: the Oscar-winning Italian film Life Is Beautiful (1997) which was directed by and starred Roberto Benigni. Buchholz played the role of a doctor who befriends Benigni's character and frequently duels with him in riddles. This choice of role proved to be an echo of Buchholz' taste in choosing his projects in earlier years; the film won best foreign film that year, and was also nominated for Best Picture. Thanks to his gift for languages, Buchholz was able to dub himself in the foreign releases of the film.
Buchholz continued making films and television appearances until 2002, by which time he was sixty-eight years old. He died the next year, in Berlin, of pneumonia. Berlin had been the city of his heart, and was buried there in honour of that fact. Horst Buchholz had been a renowned German actor, and had gained credibility in the United States and other countries. He was a varied performer, acting all kinds of roles in his life, but was always a proud German to the last.- Writer
- Director
- Actor
Above all, Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art was marked by gross contradiction. Openly homosexual, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. Accused variously by detractors of being anticommunist, male chauvinist, antiSemitic and even antigay, he completed 44 projects between 1966 and 1982, the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas. His prodigious output was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertinage that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure.) Known for his trademark leather jacket and grungy appearance, Fassbinder cruised the bar scene by night, looking for sex and drugs, yet he maintained a flawless work ethic by day. Actors and actresses recount disturbing stories of his brutality toward them, yet his pictures demonstrate his deep sensitivity to social misfits and his hatred of institutionalized violence. Some find his cinema needlessly controversial and avant-garde; others accuse him of surrendering to the Hollywood ethos. It is best said that he drew forth strong emotional reactions from all he encountered, both in his personal and professional lives, and this provocative nature can be experienced posthumously through reviewing his artistic legacy.
Fassbinder was born into a bourgeois Bavarian family in 1945. His father was a doctor and his mother a translator. In order to have time for her work, his mother frequently sent him the movies, a practice that gave birth to his obsession with the medium. Later in life, he would claim that he saw a film nearly every day and sometimes as many as three or four. At the age of 15, Fassbinder defiantly declared his homosexuality, soon after which he left school and took a job. He studied theater in the mid-sixties at the Fridl-Leonhard Studio in Munich and joined the Action Theater (aka, Anti-Theater) in 1967. Unlike the other major auteurs of the New German Cinema (e.g., Schlöndorff, Herzog and Wenders) who started out making movies, Fassbinder acquired an extensive stage background that is evident throughout his work. Additionally, he learned how to handle all phases of production, from writing and acting to direction and theater management. This versatility later surfaced in his films where, in addition to some of the aforementioned responsibilities, Fassbinder served as composer, production designer, cinematographer, producer and editor. [So boundless was his energy, in fact, that he appeared in 30 projects of other directors.] In his theater years, he also developed a repertory company that included his mother, two of his wives and various male and female lovers. Coupled with his ability to serve in nearly any crew capacity, this gave him the ability to produce his films quickly and on extremely low budgets.
Success was not immediate for Fassbinder. His first feature length film, a gangster movie called Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) was greeted by catcalls at the Berlin Film Festival. His next piece, Katzelmacher (1969), was a minor critical success, garnering five prizes after its debut at Mannheim. It featured Jorgos, an emigrant from Greece, who encounters violent xenophobic slackers in moving into an all-German neighborhood. This kind of social criticism, featuring alienated characters unable to escape the forces of oppression, is a constant throughout Fassbinder's diverse oeuvre. In subsequent years, he made such controversial films about human savagery such as Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1971) and Whity (1971) before scoring his first domestic commercial success with The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972). This moving portrait of a street vendor crushed by the betrayal and his own futility is considered a masterpiece, as is his first international success Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) (Fear Eats the Soul). With a wider audience for his efforts, however, some critics contend that Fassbinder began to sell out with big budget projects such as Despair (1978), Lili Marleen (1981) and Lola (1981). In retrospect, however, it seems that the added fame simply enabled Fassbinder to explore various kinds of filmmaking, including such "private" works as In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) and The Third Generation (1979), two films about individual experience and feelings. His greatest success came with The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) (The Marriage of Maria Braun), chronicling the rise and fall of a German woman in the wake of World War II. Other notable movies include The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1975), Satan's Brew (1976) and Querelle (1982), all focused on gay and lesbian themes and frequently with a strongly pornographic edge.
His death is a perfect picture of the man and his legend. On the night of June 10, 1982, Fassbinder took an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills. When he was found, the unfinished script for a version of Rosa Luxemburg was lying next to him. So boundless was his drive and creativity that, throughout his downward spiral and even in the moment of his death, Fassbinder never ceased to be productive.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Born Kätherose Derr in Wiesbaden, Karin Dor studied acting and ballet at school and began in films as an extra. The attractive redhead made an indelible impression on Austrian director Harald Reinl (who became her first husband in 1954) and this paved the way to higher profile roles. Her first significant featured appearance was in Reinl's melodrama Der schweigende Engel (1954). Karin subsequently shared top billing in a classroom drama about wayward matriculation students, Ihre große Prüfung (1954). During the initial segment of her career she played nice girls, mainly wide-eyed ingénues, innocent victims and assorted naive juveniles in war and period dramas (As Long as You Live (1955)), Heimatfilms (Almenrausch und Edelweiß (1957)) and operettas (The White Horse Inn (1960)).
By 1960, a more glamorous, lithe and sensual Karin had graduated to juicer roles as heroines in Edgar Wallace potboilers (beginning with Der grüne Bogenschütze (1961)) and a series of Karl May European westerns, invariably directed by Reinl and co-starring Tarzan actor Lex Barker (a combination which proved equally successful for other crime/sci-fi franchises, including The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)). Many of these pictures enjoyed only limited release and were rarely exhibited outside Germany.
Karin succeeded at last to break her stereotyping by playing a pathological serial killer wielding a cutthroat razor in another Wallace/Reinl outing, Room 13 (1964), and - for a total change of pace -- essayed Brunhilde in a two-part filming of the epic 'Die Nibelungen' (also directed by Reinl). With her international appeal now widening, she appeared in The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), a British-West German co-production, as a scientist's daughter menaced by the titular villain. To follow was arguably her best-known international role as an early 'Bond girl', Helga Brandt (alias Number Eleven), a SPECTRE operative whose failure to eliminate J.B. results in her being dropped into a piranha-infested pool by super villain Blofeld (Donald Pleasence) in You Only Live Twice (1967). She was then engaged by Alfred Hitchcock for the part of Cuban resistance leader Juanita de Cordoba in Topaz (1969) in which her character came to a similarly sticky end. Karin's career never quite recovered from this director's rare box-office aberration. British Times reviewer and Hitchcock specialist John Russell Taylor described the picture as "generally flat, undistinguished, and lacking in any sign of positive interest or involvement on his (Hitchcock's) part". In the wake of Topaz, Karin's screen appearances became infrequent, except for a couple of guest spots on American crime shows, followed by an of unsuccessful feature film comeback attempt in the incongruous thriller Warhead (1977). She was latterly seen on German television in several episodes of Rosamunde Pilcher (1993). Karin's third husband was actor and stuntman George Robotham who predeceased her in 2007.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Beaumont began his career in show business by perfoming in theatres, nightclubs, and on the radio in 1931. He attended the University of Chattanooga, but left when his position on the football team was changed. He later attended the University of Southern California, and graduated with a Master of Theology degree in 1946. He was visiting his son Hunter, a Psychology Professor in Munich, at the time of his sudden death.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Born in Austria to a French mother and a German father, young Christine Kaufmann conquered the hearts of post-war German movie audiences in movies like Der schweigende Engel (1954), Ein Herz schlägt für Erika (1956) and, most famously, Rosen-Resli (1954). Discovered at the tender age of six, Christine was soon the breadwinner for her family. This quickly changed when puberty destroyed her blooming career as "the sweet innocent child" in West Germany. Her ambitious mother, by now Christine's manager, relocated to Rome with her. In Italy, her Lolita-like qualities were appreciated and used in movies like The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) in which, at age 13, she played the love-interest of "Mr. Universe" Steve Reeves (then 32). Due to her hard work as a child (between 1952 and 1959 she starred in 18 films!), she was never able to attend school; yet, by the age of 14, young Christine was fluent in German, French, Italian, Spanish and English.
In 1959, Christine headed to London to audition for the role of Karen in Exodus (1960). Director Otto Preminger chose Jill Haworth over Kaufmann but was still so impressed with her that he recommended her for a substantial part in Gottfried Reinhardt's courtroom drama Town Without Pity (1961). The movie, which starred Kirk Douglas, E.G. Marshall and Robert Blake, became an international success and earned Kaufmann a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer. After a string of rather forgettable movies in West Germany, France, and Italy, she flew to Argentina to co-star alongside Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba (1962). Curtis, who was already 36, fell immediately for the 16-year-old German starlet, left his wife Janet Leigh and his two daughters and started to live with Christine in both Europe and in Los Angeles. (In the US, they had to keep their relationship on the DL because Christine was still underage and therefore jail bait.) Shortly after her 18th birthday, Curtis and Kaufmann got married in Las Vegas. Kirk Douglas was their best man. One of Curtis' demands was that she would retire from acting after the wedding, and Christine gladly acquiesced to his request; actually she had been dreaming of retiring since her success with Rosen-Resli (1954) which had ended her once-peaceful childhood abruptly. She later claimed that she'd never really been interested in becoming an actress in the first place and was more or less forced into it by her parents: "I was an obedient girl and wanted to make my mother happy, so I simply did what I was being told. Unfortunately, once you are famous, there's no way back, and since I didn't have a formal school education, I could not fulfill my dream of studying archaeology and art history."
Her last movie, a droll comedy titled Wild and Wonderful (1964), was released in June 1964 to mixed reviews. In July, she gave birth to her first daughter, Alexandra Curtis. Christine was 19. Two years later, a second daughter, Allegra Curtis, arrived. Her husband, who already had two daughters with his first wife, had wanted a son and was unable to hide his disappointment. By late 1966, Tony Curtis was pretty much spending his time with other women, while Christine, living the life of a 40-year-old Hollywood matron at the age of 20, was slowly growing up. In 1968, she left Curtis and filed for divorce in Mexico, because she didn't want any of his money. She took her daughters and moved back to Europe.
By the early 1970s, Christine worked steadily in theatre, on TV and occasionally in movies: "I worked with discipline, but without any interest." Art house directors like Werner Schroeter, Percy Adlon, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder cast her in sometimes interesting, but mostly forgettable movies. In 1971, she did another American movie (filmed in Madrid), the tepid, too-artsy-for-its-own-good Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) with Jason Robards and Herbert Lom, and in 1987 she was offered a wonderfully written part in Bagdad Cafe (1987) with Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder and Jack Palance which became one of the most enchantingly beautiful movies of the decade. But Christine's real passion belonged to the theatre where she acted under maverick directors like Peter Zadek and Michael Bogdanov.
She made a lasting impression on German television with her hilariously witty portrayal of Olga Behrens in Monaco Franze - Der ewige Stenz (1983), written by Patrick Süskind.
In the 1990s, now approaching 50, Christine took up writing, publishing several books on beauty, health, and fame, including three autobiographies. She also became a business woman with her own line of cosmetics which made her a fairly wealthy woman. Generous as she was, she financed (with the help of ex-stepdaughter Jamie Lee Curtis) her grandchildren's education.
After Curtis, Christine Kaufmann re-married three times, all marriages ending in divorce. She lived all over the world, including five years in Morocco. In March 2017, shortly after her 72nd birthday, Christine died of leukemia (like her mother) in Munich. She wanted to be buried next to her mother and grandmother in Vernon, just outside Paris, a wish that was granted by her older brother and her daughters.- Director
- Writer
- Actor
Michael Verhoeven was born on 13 July 1938 in Berlin, Germany. He was a director and writer, known for The Nasty Girl (1990), My Mother's Courage (1995) and Sonntagskinder (1980). He was married to Senta Berger. He died on 22 April 2024 in Grünwald, Bavaria, Germany.- Actor
- Additional Crew
Max Schreck was born in Berlin. He worked in an apprenticeship until his father's death before enrolling into a school for acting. He toured the country with his peers and was a member of several theaters until he became a part of Max Reinhardt's group of innovative German actors. He played mostly out of the norm characters, the elderly and the grotesque, because of his talent and passion for make-up and costume fabrication. Although film was a challenge in which he excitedly and hopefully participated, he had small roles in films that are scarcely available, and his real career was in German theatre. He played hundreds of roles in his lifetime. He was married to Fanny Normann, a fellow performer whom he met a short time after his actor's education and shared many times with on stage. They had no children. He died on the morning of February 20th, 1936 from a heart attack.- Actor
- Director
- Writer
Remote, somewhat morose and, as a result, intriguing, Viennese talent Oskar Werner was born in 1922, not far from the birthplace of "Waltz King" Johann Strauss, and christened Oskar Josef Bschließmayer. His parents divorced when he was fairly young.
While growing up, Oskar found performing in school plays helped draw out a deep yearning to act. As a teenager, Oskar was further tempted when his uncle managed to find him some un-credited roles in a couple of German and Austrian war-era films.
Oskar dropped out of high school in order to pursue acting. Not long after, he became the youngest actor ever, up until that point, to be offered membership to the Burgtheater.
His name was changed to 'Oskar Werner', and he made his official debut in 1941. His career, however, was almost immediately interrupted by World War II. An avowed pacifist and fervent loathing of the Nazi regime, Werner eventually was forced to wear the German Axis army uniform, but finagled his way into KP duty feigning incompetence. Moreover, he married Elizabeth Kallina, a half-Jewish actress, which further endangered his life. Their daughter, Elinore, was born in 1944. The young family spent much of their time in the Vienna woods, hiding from both the Russians and Germans after the city was shelled.
In post-war years, Oskar returned to the Burgtheater and widened his range of classics on the stage. Performing in such productions as "The Misanthrope", "I Remember Mama", "Julius Caesar" and "Danton's Death", he also played a diverse range of character roles and "older men" parts.
He did not make any kind of dent in films until appearing in both the German (1948) and English versions of The Angel with the Trumpet (1950) as one of the more dissolute members of a family of piano makers.
An aloof, handsome blond with wide-set, hooded eyes and quietly solemn features, Werner showed extreme promise in just a few Austrian/German films, including the role of composer Beethoven's manipulative young nephew 'Karl' in the Austrian-made Eroica (1949).
Less than 2 years later, Oskar would have a resounding hit starring in his very first English-language film, Decision Before Dawn (1951), as the German prisoner of war protagonist in the Fox feature.
Though ready for film-stardom, Werner's experience with the film studios quickly soured him on Hollywood, as it failed on its promise to develop him into a Hollywood commodity. As a result, he returned to Europe and his theatre roots, determined only to come back to films when it suitably piqued his interest.
He fulfilled that promise, perhaps to his career detriment.
Having become one of the most esteemed young actor found on Western European stages, he hit international celebrity with his definitive portrayal of "Hamlet" in 1952, a role he would return to frequently. He returned to filming a few years later; four of his features were released in 1955. He played a German captain in the film The Last Ten Days (1955) [released in the States as The Last Ten Days of Hitler]; Lieutenant Baumgarten in the historical thriller Spionage (1955) [aka: Colonel Redl]; the title role in the romanticized biopic The Life and Loves of Mozart (1955); and the student in the Max Ophüls drama Lola Montès (1955).
In 1957, he founded the Theatre Ensemble Oskar Werne, with which he performed in such productions as "Bacchus." He would also return on occasion to the Burgtheater where he played "Henry V" and "Prince Hal" in "Henry IV".
His interest in filming was not piqued again until 1962, when he became an international sensation alongside French star Jeanne Moreau, in François Truffaut's 'New Wave' cinematic masterpiece Jules and Jim (1962) as the highly romantic and intellectual "Jules". He stood firm, however, despite the rash of critical kudos, and did not make a film again until four years later, earning an Oscar nomination for his tortured shipboard romance with Simone Signoret (also nominated) in the glossy high seas drama Ship of Fools (1965). Notable for his roles of almost unbearable but restrained intensity, Werner furthered his film reputation by co-starring with Richard Burton and Claire Bloomin the now- classic Cold War spy film, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). Truffaut blessed him as well with another sterling role, in the futuristic classic Fahrenheit 451 (1966), but the relationship between both of the men was irreparably damaged over artistic differences during filming.
The unhappy experience Werner had during filming, triggered an already burgeoning drinking problem, and marked the start of decline of his career.
Werner made only three films following the Truffaut affair, but the roles, as usual, were performed superbly. He played the suave and very-married symphony conductor who has an illicit affair with a reporter (Barbara Ferris) in the tender remake of the June Allyson/Rossano Brazzi tearjerker Interlude (1968); he appeared as an unorthodox Jesuit priest in the all-star epic The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968); and boarded another WW II-era ship as German Faye Dunaway's Jewish husband in the all-star feature, Voyage of the Damned (1976).
Sadly, his longstanding problem with drink turned Oskar into a virtual recluse. Twice divorced (his second wife being Anne Power, the adopted daughter of father, Tyrone Power) and mother, Annabella, Werner later had a son, Felix, from a 1966 liaison with American model Diane Anderson.
His later years were spent traveling internationally, committing to poetry/pacifist readings, and occasionally performing on the stage. In 1967, he presented his one-man show 'An After-Dinner Evening with Oskar Werner', which was comprised of readings from the works of Schiller, Goethe and others. In 1970, he once-again toured with 'Hamlet'. His final stage appearance was in a 1983 production of 'The Prince of Homburg'.
On the night of Monday, 22 October, 1984, Werner canceled a concert reading at a German drama club due to illness. The following day - 23 October, 1984 Werner was found dead by heart attack, at the age of 61. He was laid to rest in his adopted country of Liechtenstein. He passed away only two days after Truffaut.- Actor
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Tall, portly built German born actor (and talented violinist) who notched up over 100 film appearances, predominantly in German-language productions. He will forever be remembered by Western audiences as the bombastic megalomaniac "Auric Goldfinger" trying to kill Sean Connery and irradiate the vast US gold reserves within Fort Knox in the spectacular "James Bond" film Goldfinger (1964). However, due to Fröbe's thick German accent, his voice was actually dubbed by English actor, Michael Collins.
While commonly perceived as cold hearted & humourless from his Goldfinger (1964) portrayal, quite to the contrary, Fröbe was a jovial man and a wonderful comedic performer. His light hearted talents can be best viewed in The Ballad of Berlin (1948), Der Tag vor der Hochzeit (1952), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes (1965). Fröbe also portrayed dogged detective Kriminalkommissar Kras/Lohmann pursuing the evil Dr. Mabuse in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961) and The Terror of Doctor Mabuse (1962).- Dieter Laser is a German actor. He is known to English-speaking audiences for his roles: Mantrid in Lexx, Prof. Otto Blaettchen in The Ogre and Dr. Joseph Heiter in The Human Centipede (First Sequence), for which he won Best Actor at the Austin Fantastic Fest. In 1975, he was awarded the German Film Award in Gold in the category of Best Actor for his title role in John Glueckstadt.
He was born in Kiel. On a cold winter afternoon at the age of sixteen, Dieter Laser went to the stage door of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg at that time the most famous theatre in Germany and he asked the doorman how to become an actor. There was an extra missing for the Christmas fairy tale afternoon-performance for children and 30 minutes later he stood on stage among a bunch of "sailors". That was the beginning of his career as an extra. - He had grown up in a fundamentalist Christian sect where the Theatre was regarded as devil's work. As a brainwashed believer he had to hazard the consequences. Therefore he made a deal with the devil: 'I will become an actor and I'll pay later on - in hell!' - Watching as an extra the famous actors "The Gods" by doing their marvelous work during rehearsals and performances became his "drama school". Gradually he got a word to speak in a play - then two words - even a sentence - a tiny part - another little part - and one day he suddenly got a contract and overnight his dream had come true: he now was a real actor with whom the "Gods" shook hands. - After 14 passionate years on stage and as a co-founder and member of the board of the meanwhile most famous German theatre, the Schaubuehne in Berlin, he decided to become a freelancer and got his first work for the cinema: the title role in John Glueckstadt. For this performance he won the German Film Award in Gold. Since then, and besides countless guest appearances on the most important stages of Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Luxemburg, with parts like Don Juan, Valmont, Peer Gynt, Macbeth, Captain Ahab etc. Dieter Laser played in about 65 films, at times co-starring with "Gods" like Burt Lancaster, Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland, Glenn Close, John Malkovich etc.. - Actress
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Hildegard Frieda Albertine Knef was born on December 28, 1925 in Ulm, Germany. In 1940, she began to study acting. Even before the fall of the Third Reich, she appeared in several films, but most of them were only released after the war. To avoid being raped by Soviet soldiers, she dressed like a young man and was sent to a camp for prisoners of war. She escaped and returned to war-shattered Berlin, where she played her first parts on stage. The first German movie after World War II, Murderers Among Us (1946), made her a star. David O. Selznick invited her to Hollywood and offered her a contract--with two conditions: Hildegard Knef should change her name to Gilda Christian, and she should pretend to be Austrian instead of German. She refused both and returned to Germany. In 1951 she provoked one of the greatest scandals in German film history when she appeared naked in the film The Sinner (1951). The Roman Catholic Church protested vehemently against that film, but Hildegard just commented: "I can't understand all that tumult--five years after Auschwitz!"
With the support of her first husband, the American Kurt Hirsch, she tried a second time to launch a Hollywood career and changed her surname from Knef to Neff (Americans could not pronounce Knef), but the only worthwhile part she got was a supporting role in the Hemingway adaptation of The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952). She became a leading lady in German, French, and British films. Finally, America offered her another chance, this time on the stage. She achieved a kind of stardom as Ninotchka in the very popular Broadway play "Silk Stockings".
In 1963 she began a new career as a singer, surprising audiences with her typical, deep, smoky voice and the fact that she wrote many of her own song lyrics. In 1970, she wrote the autobiographical bestseller "Der Geschenkte Gaul". She got sympathy from all over the world for her fight against cancer, which she defeated several times.
After the German reunification, Hildegarde Knef moved back to Berlin and died at age 76 of a lung infection on February 1, 2002.- Günter Meisner was born on 18 April 1926 in Bremen, Germany. He was an actor and director, known for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), The Boys from Brazil (1978) and In a Glass Cage (1986). He was married to Gisela Albrecht Meisner. He died on 5 December 1994 in Berlin, Germany.
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Jóhann Jóhannsson was born on 19 September 1969 in Reykjavík, Iceland. He was a composer and writer, known for Last and First Men (2020), The Theory of Everything (2014) and Sicario (2015). He died on 9 February 2018 in Berlin, Germany.- Ursula Reit was born on 5 March 1914 in Wuppertal, Germany. She was an actress, known for Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Der Teufelsschüler (1973) and The Devil's Female (1974). She died on 9 November 1998 in Germany.
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Leni Riefenstahl's show-biz experience began with an experiment: she wanted to know what it felt like to dance on the stage. Success as a dancer gave way to film acting when she attracted the attention of film director Arnold Fanck, subsequently starring in some of his mountaineering pictures. With Fanck as her mentor, Riefenstahl began directing films.
Her penchant for artistic work earned her acclaim and awards for her films across Europe. It was her work on Triumph of the Will (1935), a documentary commissioned by the Nazi government about Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, that would come back to haunt her after the atrocities of World War II. Despite her protests to the contrary, Riefenstahl was considered an intricate part of the Third Reich's propaganda machine. Condemned by the international community, she did not make another movie for over 50 years.- Actor
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Ulrich Mühe was born on 20 June 1953 in Grimma, East Germany. He was an actor and director, known for The Lives of Others (2006), Funny Games (1997) and Der letzte Zeuge (1998). He was married to Susanne Lothar, Jenny Gröllmann and Annegret Hahn. He died on 22 July 2007 in Walbeck, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.- Actor
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Like his Italian-French counterpart Lino Ventura, who had been a wrestler before becoming an actor, Berlin-born Karl-Otto Alberty was an amateur boxer before he turned to acting, making his debut in a Konstanz theater in 1959. For three decades he was to be a regular of German cinema and television as well as of international English-speaking productions. However, unlike Ventura, Alberty did not become a star, remaining confined to supporting roles or even bit parts, most of the time as a German officer, although in widely seen international productions such as The Great Escape (1963), The Damned (1969) or Raid on Rommel (1971). A lookalike of Benito Mussolini (with the exception of his white-blond hair), he would have been an ideal Duce though. A missed opportunity indeed.- Actress
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Vera Tschechowa was an elegant beautiful green-eyed German film and television actress and director of Russian descent. Her grandfather was Oscar-nominated Russian-American actor Michael Chekhov who was the nephew of writer Anton Chekhov.
She was born Vera Wilhelmowna Rust on July 22, 1940, in Berlin. Her father was Dr. Wilhelm Rust, and her mother was actress and agent Ada Tschechowa. Vera was brought up in Germany by her Russian-German grandmother, a silent film actress Olga Tschechowa. Her early childhood was affected by the Second World War. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she spent much time with her grandfather, Michael Chekhov in California, and also traveled in the United States. She started education as an artist and stage designer, then studied acting at Munich Drama school. Eventually, she followed the footsteps of her mother and grandmother and became an actress.
In 1956, she made her film debut in 'Witwer mit funf Tochtern', a film by director Heinz Erhardt. In 1959, she made her stage debut at Berlin Theater, then worked on stage at Deutsche Schauspielhaus Hamburg, and also at Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus and at Theater Basel. In 1962, she received German National Film Award for her work in 'Das Brot der Fruhen Jahre'.
Vera Tschechowa had a formidable film career as an actress as well as a director. She played over 30 roles in feature films, and made numerous appearances on television in several countries of Europe. In 1977, she received the Goldene Camera award for her role in the ZDF production 'Zeit der Emphindsamkeit'. She also appeared as herself in Chekov in My Life (1984 documentary) directed by her husband Vadim Glowna.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Tschechowa was known as a director of movie portraits, such as of Klaus Maria Brandauer (1994), Anthony Quinn (1997), and Robert Redford among her other works. In 2006, she presented her film-portrait about the Makhmalbaf family of filmmakers at the Munchner Filmfest. She spoke four languages: German, English, French, and Russian.
She died in 2024, aged 83.- Christiane Schmidtmer was born in Mannheim, Germany. She took acting lessons in Munich and worked in the stage in Germany from 1961-1963, then turned to photographic modeling for German nude magazines and later, Playboy. She also modeled for advertising companies, namely Max Factor cosmetics, before she started her movie career.
She was the beautiful mistress of José Ferrer in Ship of Fools (1965), but most people will remember her as the evil wardress in the exploitation women-in-prison film, The Big Doll House (1971), as well as one of the three airline stewardesses in Boeing, Boeing (1965). - Director
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Born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, Wilhelm Dieterle was the youngest of nine children of parents Jacob and Berthe Dieterle. They lived in poverty, and when he was old enough to work, young Wilhelm earned money as a carpenter and a scrap dealer. He dreamed of better things, though, and theater caught his eye as a teen. By the age of 16 he had joined a traveling theater company. He was ambitious and handsome, both of which opened the door to leading romantic roles in theater productions. Though he had acted in his first film in 1913, it was six more years before he made another one. In that year he was noticed by producer/director/designer/impresario Max Reinhardt, the most influential proponent of expressionism in theater; while in Berlin, Reinhardt hired him as an actor for his productions. Dieterle resumed German film acting in 1920, becoming a popular and successful romantic lead and featured character actor in the mix of German expressionist/Gothic and nature/romanticism genres that imbued much of German cinema in the silent era. He was interested in directing even more than acting, however, and he had the iconic Reinhardt to provide inspiration. Dieterle had acted in nearly 20 movies before he also began directing in 1923, his first female lead being a young Marlene Dietrich.
With his wife Charlotte Hagenbruch he started his own film production . He was said to have tired of acting; he appeared in nearly 50 films over the course of his career, mainly in the 1920s, and in several of his films he also functioned as director. As an actor he worked with some of the greatest names in German film, such as directors Paul Leni (in Waxworks (1924) [Waxworks]) and F.W. Murnau (in Faust (1926)) and actors Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings. By 1930, however, he had emigrated to the US--now rechristened as William Dieterle--with an offer from Warner Brothers to direct their German-language versions of the studio's popular hits for the German market. In that capacity he made Those Who Dance (1930), The Way of All Men (1930) and Die heilige Flamme (1931) (aka "The Holy Flames"). He even stood before the camera for another of these, Dämon des Meeres (1931) (aka "Demon of the Sea", a version of "Moby Dick") in 1931, in which he played Capt. Ahab. The film was directed by another European who was soon to become one of Warners' most successful directors: the Hungarian Michael Curtiz.
Having taken to the Hollywood brand of filmmaking with ease--helped by his own brilliance in defining and executing the telling of a story--into 1931, he was soon promoted to directing some of Warners' "regular" films (his first, The Last Flight (1931), is now regarded as a masterwork) and he wold average directing six pictures a year for the studio through 1934. In that year Reinhardt came to the US, the Nazi threat finally having driven him off the Continent. He arrived with a flourish, ready to stage William Shakespeare's "A Midsummers Night's Dream"--an extravaganza at the Hollywood Bowl that would become legend. It was impressive enough to interest the execs of Warner Bros. They opted for a film version in 1935 with the great Reinhardt--even studio boss Jack L. Warner knew who he was--reunited with his disciple, Dieterle, as co-director. Reinhardt knew nothing about Hollywood and had to learn via Dieterle's diplomacy the differences between the overemphasis of stage and the subtlety of the camera. He learned from other directors as well about the realities of making films, in particular ratchet down the tendency that stage directors had to let their actors perform "too" much. It was all for naught, however, as the film was a major box-office flop, but it was one of the great moments in the evolution of film. Dieterle would direct Paul Muni for Warners in three first-rate bio movies: The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939) and all received Oscar nominations. After that Dieterle moved on to do The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) at RKO with Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. This was one of Dieterle's best efforts, both in its romantic style and the great dark scenes of the Parisian medieval underworld with dramatic minimal lighting that gave vent to his expressionist roots.
Through the 1940s Dieterle moved around among Hollywood's studios, turning out vigorously wrought pictures, such as his two 1940 bios with Edward G. Robinson at Warner's. He became associated with independent producer David O. Selznick and actor Joseph Cotten, first with his direction of I'll Be Seeing You (1944). His romantic fires as a director had been restoked, as it were, and kept burning in the subsequent series of films with them which included the wonderful acting talents of Selznick's soon-to-be-wife (1949), Jennifer Jones: Love Letters (1945), Duel in the Sun (1946)--for which he shared directing but not credit with King Vidor--and the ethereal Portrait of Jennie (1948). "Jennie" was one of Dieterle's masterpieces, bringing into play a fusion of all his artistic fonts. The romantic fantasy with edges of darkness from the novel by Robert Nathan was just the vehicle to challenge Dieterle. His use of light and dark and gauzed--at one point the textured field of a painting canvas--backdrops conveyed the dreamlike state and netherworld atmosphere of the story of lovers from different times. Certainly the film influenced others to follow with similar themes.
Through the 1950s Dieterle's work--two more with Joseph Cotten--though sturdily in the director's hands, came off like good Hollywood fare, but were inspired more by the films' tight shooting schedules than by any artistic pretensions. His output during that decade was small, and that was partly due to bane of McCarthyism. He was never blacklisted as such, but his film Blockade (1938) was too libertarian to keep him completely away from the shadow of suspicion as a "socialist" / "communist" sympathizer. In 1958 he returned to Germany and directed a few films there and in Italy before retiring in 1965.
Though regrettably not as well known as his German and European directorial compatriots in Hollywood, he had great artistic style and worked with much energy in providing some of Hollywood's and the world's crown jewels of cinematic art.- Actor
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This dark, debonair, dashing and extremely distinguished Austrian actor was christened Adolf Wohlbrück in Vienna, the scion of a family of circus clowns. He broke away easily from generations of tradition as the circus life had no appeal whatsoever to Walbrook.
Trained by the legendary director Max Reinhardt, Walbrook's reputation grew on both the Austrian and German stages. In between he managed a couple of undistinguished roles in silent films. Billed as Adolf Wohlbrück, the youthfully handsome actor graced a number of romantic films come the advent of sound beginning in 1931. Among them Waltz War (1933) and the gender-bending comedy Victor and Victoria (1933), which later served as the inspiration and basis for Blake Edwards' own Victor/Victoria (1982) starring wife Julie Andrews. Hollywood beckoned in the late 30s for Walbrook to re-shoot dialog for an upcoming international picture The Soldier and the Lady (1937) again playing Michael Strogoff, a role he had played impeccably in both previous French and German adaptations. With the rise of oppression in Nazi Germany he moved to Great Britain and took his trademark mustache and dark, handsome features to English language films where he went on to appear to great effect.
Portraying a host of imperious kings, bon vivants and and foreign dignitaries over the course of his career, he played everything from composer Johann Strauss to the Bavarian King Ludwig I. With a tendency for grand, intense, over-the-top acting, he was nevertheless quite impressive in a number of portrayals. Such included the sympathetic German officer in the landmark Powell and Pressburger satire The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and gentle pacifist in another of their collaborations 49th Parallel (1941); as Prince Albert in the black-and-white glossy costumer Victoria the Great (1937) immediately followed by its color remake Queen of Destiny (1938) both opposite Anna Neagle's Queen Victoria; and, most notably, as the obsessively demanding impresario opposite ballerina Moira Shearer in the romantic melodrama The Red Shoes (1948). His stiff and stern military officers were just as notable which included sterling work in The Queen of Spades (1949) and last-speaking English film I Accuse! (1958).
He retired from films at the end of the 1950s, and in later years returned to the European stage and included television roles to his resume. He died in Germany in 1967 of a heart attack.- Actor
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Gottfried John was born on 29 August 1942 in Berlin, Germany. He was an actor, known for Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar (1999), GoldenEye (1995) and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). He was married to Brigitte. He died on 1 September 2014 in Utting am Ammersee, Bavaria, Germany.- Actress
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Margit Carstensen was born on 29 February 1940 in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. She was an actress, known for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Martha (1974) and Possession (1981). She died on 1 June 2023 in Heide, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.- Actor
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Widely known for his frequent collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a creative partnership which lasted 10 years and produced over 20 films, Ulli Lommel is one of the most consistently creative filmmakers to come from the New German Cinema movement.
The son of German comic performer Ludwig Manfred Lommel, Ulli Lommel began his career in show business as a child. His second feature film as a director Tenderness of the Wolves (1973) brought Lommel to New York, where he began working with Andy Warhol at The Factory. The Warhol / Lommel years spawned several features, including Cocaine Cowboys (1979) and Blank Generation (1980), both of which were directed by Lommel and feature Warhol in an acting role.
In the summer of 2013 Lommel went for nine months to Brazil, where he wrote a book and also made a film about Campo Bahia, the official camp for the German National Soccer Team. His autobiography, entitled Tenderness of the Wolves, is due out in late 2015.- Susanne Lothar was born on 15 November 1960 in Hamburg, Germany. She was an actress, known for Funny Games (1997), The White Ribbon (2009) and The Reader (2008). She was married to Ulrich Mühe. She died on 21 July 2012 in Berlin, Germany.
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Fritz Wepper was born on 17 August 1941 in Munich, Germany. He was an actor, known for Cabaret (1972), Der Kommissar (1969) and For Heaven's Sake (2002). He was married to Susanne Kellermann and Angela von Morgen. He died on 25 March 2024 in Gmund am Tegerseen, Bavaria, Germany.- Actress
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Tall, blonde, busty and radiant, Eva Renzi created a sensation when she rose to stardom in her native West Germany in the mid-60s. Born to a 17-year-old French mother and a 49-year-old Danish father, Eva's childhood was everything but happy. Her parents got divorced when she was three, and her mother put her into an orphanage run by nuns. Eva was 14 when she returned to live with her abusive father; she later claimed that "he beat the daylights out of me on a daily basis". Living with her father proved to be so difficult that Eva tried to kill herself twice before she eventually left home at the tender age of 17 to pursue a career in acting. Famous drama coach Else Bongers took her under her wing, and the beautiful teenager supported herself as a model, a phone operator, and a waitress before making her debut on stage in late 1961. She became a member of the Freie Volksbühne Berlin in 1964 when renowned director Erwin Piscator hired her as "Electra".
In early 1965, Renzi was a single mother - her daughter Anouschka Renzi was fathered by a Brazilian bar owner named Raimundo - and a fairly successful stage actress when journalist-turned-director Will Tremper became so fascinated and infatuated with her extraordinary temper and raving beauty that he wrote a movie specifically for her: That Woman (1966), a personality vehicle for Eva Renzi, successfully premiered in 1966. The German press hailed her as "a sensuous mix between Julie Christie and Ingrid Bergman", and the movie itself caused quite a stir with its almost Godard-like atmosphere and international flair. On the set of That Woman (1966), Renzi, then 21, met Paul Hubschmid, 27 years her senior. The Swiss film star and notorious womanizer fell madly in love with Eva, married her in Las Vegas in 1967 and adopted her little daughter Anouschka to raise her as his own child. By that time, Eva's international career was going gangbusters: she was doing two, sometimes three movies a year, alternating between Hollywood, France, Italy, West Germany, and England. Her most successful movies were Funeral in Berlin (1966) alongside Michael Caine (unable to master the English language without an accent, she was dubbed by Nikki Van der Zyl in this one), the charming and underrated The Pink Jungle (1968) with James Garner and George Kennedy, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) by Dario Argento, a movie that she later labeled "my career-suicide". The Renzi-Hubschmid family lived in Southern France, near Saint Tropez, and on the surface everything seemed happy, happy, happy.
By 1972, however, Eva's momentum was pretty much over, and she got tired of acting, the spotlight, her marriage, and society in general. She rejected a movie offer by Orson Welles and refused to be cast as a Bond girl in a Sean Connery film, passionately hating her sexy-girl image. She later said that, young as she was, she did not value her movie career in the first place and loathed everything about it except the money. After a miscarriage, her marriage was in deep trouble, and her often aggressive outbursts didn't help. She delved into a depression and turned to spirituality and Eastern religions to find answers. One day, she took her then 9-year-old daughter, packed the car and drove 14,000 miles to India. But that trip turned into a nightmare when she found herself in the midst of the Osho-Rajneesh movement. She later told the press about drug abuse and forced group sex experiences and launched a law suit in India against the leaders of the movement. Now in her early 30s, she relocated permanently to France and revived her career with beautifully tailored parts in Das blaue Palais (1974) and Papa Poule (1980). She gave one of her finest, most nuanced and mature performances in a supporting role in The Prodigal Daughter (1981), sensitively directed by Jacques Doillon. Her co-stars were Jane Birkin, Michel Piccoli and Natasha Parry.
Her marriage to Paul Hubschmid was practically over in 1980. The pair continued to work together on stage but lived in separate hotels. The divorce was finalized in 1983 after 16 years of marriage. In the late 1980s, Renzi returned to Germany and had a minor comeback on TV in Das Erbe der Guldenburgs (1987). She continued to act successfully in the 1990s and early 2000s, touring Germany, Austria and Switzerland with a stage production of Anton Chekhov's "The Seagull" and receiving rave reviews for her moving portrayal of a woman coming to terms with herself after her husband's death in the one-woman play "Amanda". One of her final TV appearances was alongside her (then) son-in-law Jochen Horst in Das Schweigen der Hämmer (1995).
A heavy smoker throughout her life, Eva Renzi was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2004. Mistrustful of contemporary treatments, she chose not to have any and died in her daughter's arms at the age of 60 on August 16, 2005.- Writer
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Josef Goebbels, the man who almost single-handedly developed the field of propaganda into an art form, would, for a day, be the leader of World War II Germany. Goebbels was born in the German Rhineland to strict Catholic parents. He was short, standing at 5'5", of small stature and thin build, and had a sharp, prominent nose and an oily, sallow complexion. He was rejected by the German army in World War I on the basis of being a cripple, specifically, he had a club foot for which he wore a brace, contracted after a bout of osteomyelitis. After Germany was defeated, Goebbels joined the National Socialist Workers Party, more infamously known as the Nazi party, which opposed the democratic Weimar Republic that had been set up to govern Germany. Because of his impressive oratorical skills and uncanny ability to slant arguments to his view, Goebbels was considered an ideal leader in the Nazi party. It was there that he met Hitler in 1925. Though they both shared a hatred of Jews, Goebbels, a dedicated socialist, initially tried to expel the relatively capitalistic Hitler, who he saw as simply an opportunist. He would change his tune, however, when Hitler rose in rank to become leader. Hitler rewarded Goebbels with a post as Nazi district leader of Berlin, where he would wage year-round political campaigns that eventually drained the organization of virtually all of its funds. He met and married divorcée Magda Quandt around this time. Though their membership grew, the Nazis didn't manage to attract a sizable enough number of voters - especially in Berlin - to attain any kind of legitimate political power, due to both the rebounding German economy and a distrust of the gang of street thugs within the Nazi party called the Sturm Abteilung (SA). However, after the US stock market crashed in 1929, the European economies took a tremendous hit, and the resulting worldwide economic depression hit Germany especially hard. The dire economic straits of many Germans were tailor-made for a demagogue like Hitler, and, slowly, he began to take power; first as Chancellor in 1933, then as Führer in 1934. Goebbels was named minister of entertainment and propaganda, a position that gave him have sole discretion as to what books, magazines, films, radios, newspapers, etc., could print, say, or show. Knowing the media power where the influencing of people was concerned, he searched for a director to place as the head of UFA, Germany's leading film studio. In a famous meeting, he offered the position to respected German director Fritz Lang, who tried to excuse himself by saying that he had Jewish grandparents, to which Goebbels curtly replied, "We will decide who is Jewish!" Lang promptly fled the country and Goebbels settled on a rising female director, Leni Riefenstahl, as the "official" Nazi filmmaker. She directed two documentaries on the party's Nuremburg rallies of 1932 and 1933. The first was disowned by Riefenstahl because of the little time she had to prepare and the fact that it was never shown publicly because the film featured Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, who along with many SA leaders, was murdered by the Nazi high command when they moved against the SA, just after the film was completed. Their second attempt, on which Goebbels assisted Riefenstahl extensively, is perhaps the most famous propaganda film ever made: Triumph of the Will (1935). It took almost a year to prepare from the miles upon miles of footage shot. It was a success worldwide, but was not particularly popular in Germany at the time. Goebbels then commissioned Riefenstahl to shoot the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which the Nazi leadership assumed would be dominated by German athletes. The Germans did win the total medal counts, but African-American sprinter Jesse Owens shattered the myth of Aryan dominance by winning gold medals in four different events - more than any other competitor - and was idolized by the German crowds.
After World War II broke out, Goebbels was responsible for creating a massive propaganda body of work by the German government, much of which still remains recorded. He was known to use almost anything for propaganda purposes, such as posters from French and German movies with Jewish stars as examples of the "typical Jew." Even when Germany was crumbling in 1945 and the Allies demanded unconditional surrender, Goebbels used that as a motivational tool to demonstrate that every German needed to fight or face destruction.
As Allied forces began to advance toward Germany, a paranoid and rapidly deteriorating Hitler had many of his assistants executed or imprisoned, but Goebbels was given the title of "Defender of Berlin." Hitler committed suicide by gunshot on April 30, leaving Goebbels as the next in command to take over the faltering government, which, by then, controlled only a small part of Berlin. As both Soviet forces on one side and American and British forces on the other closed in on the capital, Goebbels was well aware of the fate he would meet if he were captured alive. On May 1, 1945, he reluctantly endorsed the plan his wife had conjured, which she had communicated to Albert Speer, and permitted her to drug their six children with morphine and proceed to poison them to death through the administration of a cyanide capsule. Later that day, after requesting a moment of privacy with his wife from the onlooking SS soldiers, he shot her in head, as they had also planned, and then took his own life within seconds. Soviet troops, who Goebbels had always boasted would never get to Berlin, found him and his wife partially burnt and unburied outside the Fuhrerbunker. He was survived only by a stepson from Magda's first marriage.- Actress
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Olga Chekhova (also Olga Tschechova in German), one of the most popular stars of the silent film era, remained a mysterious person throughout her life and was accused of being a Russian agent in Nazi Germany.
She was born Olga Konstantinovna von Knipper on April 26, 1897, in Aleksandropol, Transcaucasia, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia). She was the second of 3 children in a bilingual Russian-German family. Her father, Konstantin Leonardovich Knipper, a Lutheran of German descent. He made a military career in Russia as a railroad engineer. Young Olga studied art and literature at an art school in St. Petersburg. Later as an immigrant in Germany she claimed friendship with the family of Tsar Nicholas II--who also was of German origin--and that she had encountered the notorious Russian mystic and monk, Grigory Rasputin. In reality, she was sent from St. Petersburg to Moscow to her aunt, actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova, to study acting at Moscow Art Theatre. In 1914, at age 17, she eloped with Russian-Jewish actor Michael Chekhov, nephew of Anton Chekhov.
Olga adored her husband, Michael Chekhov, a rising star of stage and film. But he met another beauty, Xenia Zimmer, and became involved in extramarital affair while Olga was pregnant with their child. Their daughter, Ada Tschechowa, was born in 1916. Olga separated from Michael Chekhov during the tragic time of the Russian Revolution in 1917. That same year she made her film debut in a Russian silent film, Anya Kraeva (1918).
Olga claimed that she fled Russia disguised as a peasant woman and posed as a mute while carrying a diamond ring in her mouth. In reality she married an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, Friedrich Jaroshi, and took a train from the Moscow Belorussky station to Vienna, Austria, having travel documents from the Russian Commissar of Culture (and she was also helped by the Russian intelligence agency in exchange for her cooperation). She was later invited to the Soviet Embassy in Berlin for meetings with Soviet officials. In Germany she was introduced to film producer Erich Pommer and renowned director F.W. Murnau, who gave her a leading role in his film, The Haunted Castle (1921). She quickly became a huge star in Europe and played in more than 40 silent films during the decade. Olga was joined by ex-husband Michael Chekhov in several films, including Der Narr seiner Liebe (1929) (aka "The Fool of Love"), which she also directed.
Future Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly fell for Olga upon seeing her cold and beautiful face in several films in the 1920s. She was famous for her movie image as a baroness and was courted in the 1930s by Luftwaffe boss Hermann Göring and by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Some wives of high-ranking Nazi officials were jealous of and hated the beautiful Olga. Goebbels was known to have visited her home on several occasions when he wanted to be away from his Nazi "activities". He invited Olga to several Nazi receptions and introduced her to Adolf Hitler in April 1933. Olga became a personal friend of Hitler and was photographed sitting next to "Der Fuhrer" at official events of the Nazi Party. She also received valuable Christmas gifts from Hitler, and regular birthday presents and other tokens of his attention.
In 1936 Olga was honored with the title of "State Actress" of the Third Reich and was made a German citizen. She married a wealthy Belgian businessman, Marcel Robyns. One day prior to the wedding she had a private reception with Hitler, who gave her permission to retain her German citizenship. Two years later she divorced Robyns and returned to her high-society life in Berlin. Her famous 1939 photo-op with Hitler was thoroughly analyzed in Moscow.
She was invited by Soviet officials to join Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop at the meeting with Vyacheslav Molotov and Gen. V. N. Merkulov at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin in 1940. At that time Olga was associated with her agent-brother Lev Knipper, who was sent from Moscow to Germany on a secret mission to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The plan was to use one of Olga's visits with Hitler for a suicide attack on the Fuhrer. Olga was kept oblivious of the plan, which was aborted by an order from Joseph Stalin, who became paranoid about the possibility of Germany's alliance with Britain if Hitler was killed. Interestingly, Stalin and Hitler were both amateur film directors in the 1920s, but as dictators they now directed the course of history.
Olga was invited by Josef Goebbels to the official reception in Berlin in July of 1941, only a month after the Nazis invaded Russia and Luftwaffe bombings caused massive devastation to Russian cities. Goebbels announced the planned occupation of Moscow.
She was being investigated by the SS on orders from SS leader Heinrich Himmler. She was constantly under surveillance by both Nazi and Soviet agents in her Berlin home. As the war progressed and conditions got progressively worse for the Nazi regime, party bosses became increasingly paranoid. Himmler was planning to arrest her in January of 1945. One early morning she was informed of Himmler's move. She immediately called him directly with a request for a favor--to let her finish her morning cup of coffee comfortably. When SS commandos surrounded her home Himmler opened her door and was met by an angry Adolf Hitler, who in no uncertain terms informed Himmler that he had made a mistake.
Olga was a beautiful pawn in a dangerous game between the two most destructive powers in the Second World War. She survived through acting, cheating, lying and disguise. She protected her daughter Ada from Nazi anti-Semitism by hiding the fact that her ex-husband, Michael Chekhov, was Jewish. Her brother Lev Knipper was held in a Nazi concentration camp and managed to survive because of his perfect German (and probably with her help). During the savage battle for Berlin just before the war's end, Olga hid in a bomb shelter and was eventually taken prisoner by the Red Army. She was flown to Moscow in April of 1945, for debriefing at the offices of Soviet secret police officials Viktor Abakumov and Lavrenti Beria. She discreetly attended the Moscow Art Theatre performance of "The Cherry Orchard" starring her aunt Olga Knipper-Chekhova in May of 1945. They were not allowed to talk and her aunt Olga fainted backstage.
After two months of interrogations in Moscow, on June 26, 1945, Olga was flown back to Berlin, where she was assisted by the Soviet Army. She was given money and moved in to a Soviet-supervised house on Spree Strasse in the Soviet sector of East Berlin. Several articles in the French and British presses stated that she was a clandestine agent and secretly decorated by the Soviet government. She praised the Russian victory over the Nazis in a private letter to her aunt Olga Knipper-Chekhova. Meanwhile, the film she made in Hollywood turned out to be a flop in the US market, mainly because of her heavy Russian accent.
She continued a film career in Europe and ran her own film production company, Venus-Film Olga Tschechowa. In 1950 she moved to Munich and starred in several films. In 1955 she used her star power to launch a successful cosmetics company, "Olga Tscheschowa Kosmetik Geselschaft." Her remarkable acting career, spanning almost 60 years, ended in 1978, with a small film role as a grandmother.
Her personal file was temporarily available for viewing at the KGB archives in Moscow. One report on her was prepared and signed by the notoriously brutal KGB chief Viktor S. Abakumov. On that report a handwritten question was left by a reader in Kremlin: "What do you suggest to be done with Ms. Chekhova?", the handwriting was by Joseph Stalin. Stalin was quoted as having said, "The actress Olga Chekhova will be very useful in the post-war years", and she probably was. One of her films was titled Der Mann, der zweimal leben wollte (1950), or "The Man Who Wanted to Live Two Lives"--and that was exactly what she did.
In 1955, Olga was saddened by the death of Michael Chekhov. In 1966, Olga suffered from another tragedy: her only daughter Ada died in an airplane crash. Devastated by the painful loss, Olga suffered from bouts of depression and turned to alcohol, but she survived thanks to her strong will and lust for life. She lived for another fifteen years, played a few more roles in the movies, and saw her great-grandchildren grow. Moments before she died, sensing the end was near, she ordered a glass of champagne from her granddaughter Vera Tschechowa. That was March 9, 1980, in Munich, Germany.
Her last words were, "Life is beautiful!"- Robert Graf was born on 18 November 1923 in Witten, Germany. He was an actor, known for The Great Escape (1963), Aren't We Wonderful? (1958) and Jonas (1957). He was married to Selma Urfer. He died on 4 February 1966 in Munich, Bavaria, West Germany.
- Hannes Messemer was born on 17 May 1924 in Dillingen an der Donau, Bavaria, Germany. He was an actor, known for The Great Escape (1963), General Della Rovere (1959) and The Devil Strikes at Night (1957). He was married to Monika Keusch, Susanne Korda, Rose Schäfer and Herta Jung. He died on 2 November 1991 in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
- Birol Ünel was born on 18 August 1961 in Silifke, Mersin, Turkey. He was an actor, known for Head-On (2004), Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Soul Kitchen (2009). He died on 3 September 2020 in Berlin, Germany.
- Cinematographer
- Director
- Actor
Michael Ballhaus was a German cinematographer. He worked on many American films, including Baby It's You (1983), Old Enough (1984), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Goodfellas (1990), Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993), Gangs of New York (2002), and The Departed (2006).
Ballhaus was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, for Broadcast News (1987), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), and Gangs of New York (2002), but never won.
His son Florian Ballhaus is also a cinematographer who worked on Flightplan (2005) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006).
Ballhaus died on 11 April 2017, at the age of 81.- Actress
- Soundtrack
Barbara Valentin was born on 15 December 1940 in Vienna, Austria. She was an actress, known for World on a Wire (1973), Our Man in Jamaica (1965) and Horrors of Spider Island (1960). She was married to Helmut Dietl, Rald Lüders and Ernst Reichardt. She died on 22 February 2002 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.- Actress
- Make-Up Department
- Soundtrack
Heidi Brühl was born on 30 January 1942 in Gräfelfing, Bavaria, Germany. She was an actress, known for Hochzeit auf Immenhof (1956), Der Zigeunerbaron (1962) and Ferien auf Immenhof (1957). She was married to Brett Halsey. She died on 8 June 1991 in Starnberg, Bavaria, Germany.- Dorrie Kavanaugh was born on 12 July 1945 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. She was an actress, known for Dark Shadows (1966), Hester Street (1975) and The Edge of Night (1956). She was married to Kristjan Johannsson. She died on 31 December 1983 in Bonn, West Germany.
- Alistair MacLean was born on 28 April 1922 in Daviot, Scotland, UK. He was a writer, known for The Guns of Navarone (1961), Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Puppet on a Chain (1970). He was married to Mary Marcelle Georgius and Gisela Heinrichsen. He died on 2 February 1987 in Munich, Germany.
- Actor
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First he should take over his father's inheritance. When his parents divorced, Rühmann was just 14 years old. His father then committed suicide. In 1919, after completing his schooling and completing his secondary school leaving certificate, Rühmann took acting lessons. He got his first theater role a year later in the play "Rose Bernd". Shortly afterwards, Rühmann played with Theo Lingen at the Residenztheater in Hanover. In 1923 Rühmann became a member of the Schauspielhaus Munich, from where he moved to the Munich Kammerspiele a year later. During this time he married the actress Maria Herbot. Rühmann got his major roles from 1927 in Berlin with Max Reinhardt. Among others, he played here with Marlene Dietrich and Hans Albers.
In 1930, Rühmann realized his dream and got his pilot's license. The famous film "The Three from the Gas Station" was also made during this time. The film, which was one of the first German sound films, made him the most popular actor in Germany. During the Second World War, Rühmann was indifferent to politics. He tried to come to terms with the rules of National Socialist cultural policy, which benefited his career. He was later blamed for his friendship with high-ranking members of the Nazi regime. In 1938 he divorced his wife. Shortly afterwards he married the actress Hertha Feiler, with whom he also had a son. From 1938 to 1945 Rühmann was a member of the Berlin State Theater under the direction of Gustav Gründgens. During the Second World War, Rühmann was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a pilot. The funny film "Quax, the Break Pilot" was made, which was specially commissioned from Ufa-Film in 1941 by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to keep the people happy.
In 1944, Rühmann appeared in the legendary comedy "Die Feuerzangenbowle", one of the classics that was produced to calm the "home front" during the war years. The film became one of his most famous films. After the end of the war, Rühmann was "denazified" and a temporary ban on playing was lifted. He moved back to Munich with his family and founded his own film company "Comedia" here in 1947. But this didn't bring him any luck; he had several failures. It wasn't until the film "Don't Be Afraid of Big Animals" came out that things started to look up again financially. Rühmann became a respected actor in post-war German cinema. He also had great success with "The Captain of Köpenick" by Carl Zuckmayer, among others. In this film, Rühmann played a shoemaker who took advantage of the confusion of authority in the military hierarchy to put himself in the position of a captain. In the 1950s, successful entertainment films such as "When the Father and the Son", "Charley's Aunt" and "The Pauker" were made.
With the thriller "It Happened in Broad Daylight" he asserted himself in demanding roles. In 1957 Rühmann was awarded the German Film Critics' Prize. Over time, the comedian became a character actor. Rühmann made a film in Hollywood in 1965: "The Ship of Fools" alongside Vivien Leigh. "The Love Carousel" was also created in 1965 with Gert Fröbe and Curd Jürgens. In 1966 the actor received the Federal Cross of Merit and in 1972 the Federal Film Prize. In 1968 Rühmann got his first television role in the film "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller. Two years later his wife died. On October 9, 1974, he married Hertha Droemer for the third time. After the film "Fondenes Fressen" was filmed, Rühmann withdrew from acting and only appeared occasionally on television.
During this time he wrote his autobiography "That was it". A final film was released in 1993: "Far away, so close" by Wim Wenders. In 1995 he was posthumously awarded the Golden Camera as "Greatest German Actor of the Century".
Heinz Rühmann died on October 3, 1994 at the age of 92 on Lake Starnberg.- Director
- Writer
- Producer
Director Max Ophüls was born Max Oppenheimer in Saarbrücken, Germany. He began his career as a stage actor and director in the golden twenties. He worked in cities such as Stuttgart, Dortmund, Wuppertal, Vienna, Frankfurt, Breslau and Berlin. In 1929 his son Marcel Ophüls was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He had begun to work under his pseudonym Max Ophüls by that time. In the early 1930s Ophüls discovered the movie world and began to work as an assistant director for Anatole Litvak. He directed his first movies (Dann schon lieber Lebertran (1931), Die verliebte Firma (1932)) in that time too. Around 1933 he emigrated to France and also worked in the Netherlands and Italy for a period of eight years. In 1941 he emigrated again, this time to the USA where he worked for a period of 10 years before he went back to France in 1950. Beginning in 1954 he also worked in Germany again, mainly for German radio in Baden-Baden. Max Ophüls died in March 1957 in Hamburg, Germany and is buried on the famous cemetery Père-Lachaise in Paris, France.- Helmut Griem was born on 6 April 1932 in Hamburg, Germany. He was an actor, known for Cabaret (1972), The Damned (1969) and Fabrik der Offiziere (1960). He was married to Helga Koehler. He died on 19 November 2004 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
- After spending most of her childhood in Sweden, Dorothea was schooled in Dresden and at the age of 12, was taught dance by Maria Moissi in Berlin. She made her stage debut in Vienna , where she appeared in plays by Carl Zuckmayer and Ferenc Molnár. The Swiss-born made her debut in the silent cinema in 1926 after being spotted by the director Franz Seitz. Her greatest impact was to be in Leontine Sagan's pioneering feminist film Mädchen in Uniform (1931) in the leading role of the teacher Fraeulein von Bernburg.
On the strength of this performance, she was signed by Paramount to star in Cradle Song (1933). While her performance was poignant, the film flopped at the box office and her second Hollywood effort (Miss Fane's Baby Is Stolen (1934), based on the Lindbergh kidnapping case) did even worse. This, combined with accusations of espionage, forced her return to Germany. Back home, she made no secret of her dislike of the Nazi regime and her career suffered as a result. Only a few roles in relatively minor films followed. After the war, she devoted most of her time to the theatre (with sporadic appearances on screen) and between 1961 and 1967 taught acting at her own academy in Berlin. - George S. Patton III was a highly successful and highly controversial general who held Corps- and Army-level commands during World War II. Because of his great competence as a battlefield commander, Patton might have led the American troops during the invasion of Normandy; however, his impolitic ways and a degree of emotional instability (which manifested itself in the slapping of two soldiers suffering from shell-shock at an Army field hospital) put the kibosh on that. Patton was relieved of his command and put on ice for many months in order to recuperate. Instead, the command of the American forces on D-Day, went to his former deputy in North Africa, Omar N. Bradley.
Patton was known as "Blood & Guts" ("Our blood, his guts"), was a common gripe among his troops for his hard-driving discipline, which paid off in lower casualties and great success on the battlefield. With the exception of Douglas MacArthur, Patton ranks as the greatest general the United States put on the field during the Second World War. Patton achieved four-star rank for his battlefield exploits as one of the best commanders of mechanized forces on either side during the War. He succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as the Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone in Germany, when Ike -- a five-star general -- was promoted to Army Chief of Staff.
On December 9, 1945, Patton became seriously injured after his automobile crashed with an American army truck at low speed. He began bleeding from a gash on his head, and complained that he was paralyzed and having trouble breathing. Taken to a hospital in Heidelberg, Patton was discovered to have a compression fracture and dislocation of the cervical third fourth vertebrae, resulting in a broken neck and cervical spinal cord injury that rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. He spent most of the next twelve days in spinal traction to decrease the pressure on his spine. He died at age 60 in his sleep of pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure.
On December 24, 1945, General George S. Patton was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial alongside some wartime casualties of the Third Army, in accordance with his request to "be buried with his men". He was immortalized in the 1970 eponymous epic film, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor (George C. Scott). This was President Richard Nixon's favorite film. - Actress
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Dana Vávrová was born on 9 August 1967 in Prague, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic]. She was an actress and director, known for Herbstmilch (1989), Amadeus (1984) and Der letzte Zug (2006). She was married to Joseph Vilsmaier. She died on 5 February 2009 in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.- Ulrike Butz, daughter of television presenter Hermann Butz, grew up in the Bavarian district of Miesbach. At the age of 17, she left her parents' home to go to Southern Europe, but only made it as far as Munich, where she was shooting nudes as a 17-year-old. It was during this time that she first came into contact with drugs.
In 1972 she started working as an actress in the German soft sex film industry, which was just flourishing. Between 1972 and 1974, Ulrike starred in 28 films, including film series such as The School Girls (1970) (parts four through seven), The Miner' Wife ... Takes Her Pick (1972) (parts one, three and four), Wide Open Marriage (1973) and other pseudo-documentary report films such as Nurses Report (1972), Sex-Träume-Report (1973), Swedish Lessons in Love (1973) and 14 and Under (1973). She played her most demanding role in The Devil's Plaything (1973), a horror film directed by Joseph W. Sarno.
With nearly 30 film roles, Ulrike was one of the busiest actresses of the genre. As one of the few actresses in the industry, her acting talent was witnessed. In February 1974, the chubby, busty actress was featured in a photo spread for Playboy magazine. During this time she came into contact with the wrong friends, who again associated her with drugs. Her father tried several times to get his daughter out of this milieu. He financed several rehabs, a luxury apartment and a mannequin apprenticeship, which she dropped out of. In 1976, she spent some time in prison for a theft offense.
After her father died in 1976, Butz slipped back into the drug milieu. In 1979, she had to serve another prison sentence in Aichach for drug possession. After successful rehab, she worked as a waitress, began a relationship and had a son. In 1981, Butz went into business for herself with money from her father's inheritance and opened a costume shop in Munich's Neuhausen district, but it went bankrupt after a few years. Franz Marischka cast her again in two productions of the sex film industry, which was by now coming to an end: Laß laufen, Kumpel (1981) and Die unglaublichen Abenteuer des Guru Jakob (1983) with Zachi Noy, Thomas Ohrner and Sibylle Rauch.
She died at the age of 46 in Munich, the urn grave is located at the Waldfriedhof. - Actress
- Stunts
- Soundtrack
The daughter of a railroad official, Camilla Horn was educated in Germany and Switzerland. She initially trained as a dressmaker and received her first job experience in a fashion salon in Erfurt. This was merely a stepping stone for a performing career which began with dance lessons in Berlin and subsequent acting studies under Lucie Höflich. The lithe, blond and strikingly beautiful Camilla soon appeared in cabaret revues staged by Rudolf Nelson. By 1926, she was employed as an extra at Ufa, where she was spotted by the director F.W. Murnau, who found in her the ideal representation of Gretchen for his seminal production of Faust (1926) . The role catapulted Camilla to instant stardom. Within a year, she was signed by United Artists in Hollywood, befriending Charles Chaplin and, more importantly, studio chairman Joseph M. Schenck. The friendship with Schenck may, or may not, have led to an affair -- depending on which story one is to believe -- but it did result in two high profile starring roles opposite John Barrymore in the torrid melodramas Tempest (1928) and Eternal Love (1929), both produced by Schenck. Neither film was a commercial success.
With the coming of sound, Camilla returned to Europe, briefly appearing on stage in London and Paris, before resuming her screen career in Germany. As the 1930's went on, she rarely turned down a role, playing anything from baronesses and fashion models, to vamps and 'fallen women'. The quality of her films was variable, but there were several noteworthy standouts, such as Hans in allen Gassen (1930) (opposite Hans Albers), The Last Waltz (1934) and Fahrendes Volk (1938) (as a circus artiste, again with Albers).
During this tumultuous decade, Camilla conducted a lengthy affair with the singer Louis Graveure, fifteen years her senior. This came to an end in 1938, when Graveure was suspected of espionage by the Gestapo and fled to England, via the Cote d'Azure. After her luxury villa in Berlin was ransacked in search for non-existent clues, Camilla's outspoken criticism of the Nazi regime reached a point where it got her into serious trouble. She saw out the first half of her career with a trio of long forgotten films made in Italy. Having failed in an attempt to flee to Switzerland, she kept a low profile and even tried her hand at farming. After the war, she had a stint as an interpreter for the occupying U.S. forces in Germany. Camilla made a successful return to the stage in a 1948 Frankfurt production of Jean Cocteau's "L'Aigle a Deux Tetes" (aka 'The Eagle Has Two Heads'). She spent the latter half of her acting career playing grand dames, matriarchs and worldly ladies with colourful backgrounds, in both films and on television. In 1974, she was awarded the 'Filmband in Gold' (also known as 'Lola') for lifetime achievement in the German film industry. In her 1985 autobiography, "Verliebt in die Liebe" ('In Love with Love'), she happily recounted her marriages and liaisons.- Actress
- Additional Crew
Helga Anders was born on 11 January 1948 in Innsbruck, Tirol, Austria. She was an actress, known for Mädchen, Mädchen (1967), Im weissen Rößl (1967) and Amerika oder der Verschollene (1969). She was married to Roger Fritz. She died on 31 March 1986 in Haar, Bavaria, Germany.- Actor
- Soundtrack
Born in Nuremberg on February 27, 1910, the son of a school teacher, well-known German actor Wolfgang Preiss started studying philosophy and theatre sciences alternately (including dance training) and made his stage debut in 1932 in Munich. He appeared in many theatres throughout his country in the 30s including Heidelberg, Bonn, Bremen, Stuttgart, Baden-Baden and Berlin.
Beginning in a couple of early 1940s German films, WWII interrupted Preiss' movie output for quite some time, but, in many ways, the war never left him, for he would continue playing war-time colonels, generals, and field marshals for the duration of his prolific career.
Following more theatre and radio work, Preiss returned to post-war German filming and was seldom seen out of uniform with a mass of pictures including Deadly Decision (1954), The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (1955) (starring role), Der Cornet - Die Weise von Liebe und Tod (1955), Anastasia: The Czar's Last Daughter (1956), Stresemann (1957), Haie und kleine Fische (1957) and I Was All His (1958). His diabolical tendencies also lent to his casting as the title criminal mastermind in a series of mystery films: The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), The Return of Dr. Mabuse (1961), The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962), The Terror of Doctor Mabuse (1962) and Dr. Mabuse vs. Scotland Yard (1963).
Preiss continued to keep his Nazi uniform starched and pressed as he branched out internationally for such 1960's war films as The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), The Longest Day (1962), The Cardinal (1963), The Train (1964), Von Ryan's Express (1965), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Anzio (1968) and Battle of the Commandos (1969). As the nemesis of such American heroes as William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum and Peter Falk, he moved into the next decade with portrayals of Rommel in Raid on Rommel (1971) starring Richard Burton and Field Marshal Von Rundstedt in Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far (1977) which featured an international star cast.
Preiss would appear in over 100 German and continental productions in his lifetime. Other popular filming would include featured roles in The Salzburg Connection (1972), The Boys from Brazil (1978), Bloodline (1979) and The Formula (1980). In his twilight years, Preiss turned more and more to TV as part of the ensemble casts of the quality miniseries Wallenstein (1978), The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). He ended his career with a role in the French adventure movie drama Aire libre (1996).
Preiss died on November 27, 2002, at the age of 92, as the result of a fall. Married three times, he was survived by his third wife, Ruth, whom he married in 1955.- Actress
- Additional Crew
- Soundtrack
One of the pre-eminent divas of post-war German cinema, Hannelore Elsner (born 'Elstner') was the consummate actress: a gifted and versatile performer with a penchant for intense roles, often as emancipated, strong-willed women. A Bavarian engineer's daughter (her father died of tuberculosis when she was eight), 'Hanni' first took acting classes in Munich where she also debuted on stage at the Kammerspiele and the Kleine Komödie. She appeared on screen from 1959, initially in teenage melodramas and 'Paukerfilms', later featuring as a regular guest star on TV in procedural crime dramas like Isar 12 (1961) and Stahlnetz (1958) . From the late 60's, Elsner alternated 'sexy roles' (such as her native American maiden in Christoph Kolumbus oder Die Entdeckung Amerikas (1969) ) with more demanding fare. Under the direction of such prominent film makers as Wolfgang Staudte, Edgar Reitz and Alf Brustellin, she proved her diverse range, headlining, respectively, in the satirical caper comedy Die Herren mit der weissen Weste (1970), the period biopic Der Schneider von Ulm (1978) and the hard-luck drama Der Sturz (1979). Among many other notable big screen credits were the romantic drama Der grüne Vogel (1980) (directed by István Szabó) and the delightful Otto Sander farce Wer spinnt denn da, Herr Doktor? (1982). Elsner's powerful tour-de-force acting showcase Die Unberührbare (2000) won her the first of two German film awards as Best Actress, as well as a Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. A patrician beauty well into middle age, she captured a large fan base on the small screen as star of Lady Cop (1994), a role which developed from two previous guest spots as a Chief Inspector in the long-running police series Tatort (1970).
She was married and divorced twice. Her subsequent life partner (from 1999) was Günter Blamberger, a professor of German philology. Her memoirs, entitled "Im Überschwang - Aus meinem Leben", appeared in 2011. Hannelore Elsner died after a long battle with cancer on April 21 2019 at the age of 76.- Tilo Prückner was born on 26 October 1940 in Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany. He was an actor, known for The NeverEnding Story (1984), Iron Sky (2012) and Der Willi-Busch-Report (1979). He was married to Ute Paffendorf and Brigitte. He died on 2 July 2020 in Berlin, Germany.