Horst Janson was born in 1935 in Germany. He made his acting debut in 1959 in “Buddenbrooks”. His other films include in 1970 “You Can’t Win Em All” with Tony Curtis and Charles Bronson, “The McKenzie Break” , “Murphy’s War” and perhaps his most noteworhty role in “Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter”.
Wikipedia entry:
Horst Janson (b. 1935) is a popular German actor who played Horst on Sesamstrasse from 1979 until 1983. By the time he appeared on the German version of Sesame Street, Janson had already established himself as a star in his homeland and abroad. From 1959 onward, Janson was active in German film and television, culminating in a principal role on the circus drama Salto mortale (as Sascha Dorian). A spate of English-language projects followed, mostly war or escape movies like You Can’t Win ‘Em All,The McKenzie Break, and Murphy’s War (with Peter O’Toole). He also guest starred on Upstairs, Downstairs as the dashing Baron Klaus von Rimmer.
Continuing to migrate between Germany and England, he starred as the title characters on the German TV drama Der Bastian and in the Hammer horror film Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter. Still other international credits include Shout at the Devil (with Roger Mooreand Ian Holm) and the TV movies To Catch a King (as the German villain) and The Last Days of Patton. He remains an active presence on German television. On December 12, 2012, Janson attended the opening of the Berlin-based exhibition 40 Jahre Sesamstrasse and appeared in a Q&A onstage with Samson (now played by another puppeteer from when he knew the bear). In 2013 he appeared in the documentary Als die Sesamstrasse nach Deutschland kam (“When Sesame Street Came to Germany”), talking about his experience working on the show.
Elissa Landi was born in 1904 in Venice in Italy. She was raised in Austria and educated in England. In the 1920’s she appeared in many Euopean productions. In 1931 she went to Hollywood. She had a few years of big budget films such as “The Sign of the Cross” in 1931 and in 1934 “The Count of Monte Cristo” opposite Robert Donat in his only Hollywood film. She retired from films in 1943. Elissa Landi died in New York in 1948 aged only 43.
Elissa Landi was born in Venice, Italy, on December 6, 1904. From childhood she was fascinated with the stage. As many little girls did at the time, Elissa wanted nothing more than to be a big star on the great stages of Europe. Her acting career started out at local theater companies, eventually leading her to the hallowed stages of London, where she made her debut in “The Storm.” The play lasted for five months and she received rave reviews for her performances. That in turn led to meaty leads in “Lavendar Ladies” and other plays. European film producers took notice of the photogenic beauty and Elissa starred in eight movies over the next two years. Her first film was the German-made Synd (1928). Her career didn’t impress critics, though, until she played Anthea Dane in The Price of Things (1930). Elissa felt that she would make more headway in the U.S., so she arrived in New York in 1931 to star in the stage version of “A Farewell to Arms.” Although the play made no huge impression, Hollywood sat up and took notice, and she soon appeared in Body and Soul (1931) opposite Charles Farrell. However, it wasn’t until Cecil B. DeMille‘s biblical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932) that many moviegoers got their first glimpse of Elissa, and they were enthralled, even though she was among such heavyweight stars as Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Charles Laughton and Vivian Tobin. Completed in less than eight weeks, the film was a smash hit. After A Passport to Hell (1932) and Devil’s Lottery (1932), Elissa scored again in The Warrior’s Husband (1933), a film about the intrigues and intricacies of the old Roman Empire that starred Marjorie Rambeau and Ernest Truex. In 1934 Elissa co-starred withRobert Donat in the classic The Count of Monte Cristo (1934). The next year saw Elissa in an odd bit of casting as Lisa Robbia in Enter Madame! (1935) with Cary Grant, the era’s greatest leading man. Elissa was required to sing for this part, which she had difficulty doing (her voice was eventually dubbed by a professional singer) and also required her to throw temper tantrums, something else she found difficult to do and for which a double also was eventually used, all to no avail, as the film was a critical and financial flop. After a mediocre role in Mad Holiday (1936), Elissa had a better part as the tormented Selma Landis in the hit After the Thin Man (1936), the second film in the series. She appeared in only three movies after that, the last being the low-budget Corregidor (1943) for bottom-of-the-barrel Producers Releasing Corporation. When that picture was completed, Elissa left films behind and concentrated on writing, producing six novels and books of poetry. Elissa succumbed to cancer on October 21, 1948. She was just 43 years old.
– IMDb Mini Biography By: Denny Jackson
Entry by Denny Jackson on IMDB:
The above entry can also be accessed on IMDB online here.
Christine Kaufmann died in a Munich hospital in the night to March 28, 2017. At 72, she lost her battle with leukemia. Her daughters Alexandra and Allegra and her granddaughters Elisabeth and Dido were with her during her final days.
Christine Kaufmann initially thought that she suffered from a flu. The doctors diagnosed her with leukemia. She was last seen on TV on March 12, 2017 in a cooking show on the channel münchen.tv where, according to media reports, she was talking about morning and death, without revealing that she was fighting leukemia.
Christine Kaufmann was born on January 11, 1945 in the Austrian region of Styria. She was the daughter of the German air force officer Johannes Kaufmann and the French theatrical makeup artist Geneviève Gavaert.
On the film website IMDB, Christine Kaufmann has 109 film credits (until 2014). Here a few milestones of her career:
She was a child-star who made her (uncredited) acting debut in 1952 in the movie Im Weissen Rössl, based on Willi Forst’s operetta of the same name. The following year, she was part of the circus movie Salto Mortale with Karlheinz Böhm. In 1954, she rose the greater prominence with her role as “Rose-Girl Resli” (Rosen Resli) in the eponymous film drama based on the book by the Swiss writer Johanna Spyri, who is most famous for her book Heidi.
After a series of German films, she went to Italy. In 1959, she could for instance be seen in the movies Primo amore by director Mario Camerini, in The Last Days of Pompeji with Steve Reeves and in Vacanze d’inverno, an Italian comedy starring famous actors such as Alberto Sordi, Michèle Morgan and Vittorio De Sica.
In 1962, Christine Kaufmann won a Golden Globe for her 1961-Hollywood debut Town Without Pity (DVD at AmazonUSA). She plays a German girl raped by American soldiers. Kirk Douglas plays the role of US major Steve Garrett who defends the rapists and blames the girl for what happened. His attacks push her to commit suicide.
In real life, the friendship of Christine Kaufmann with co-star Kirk Douglas lasted until the end. According to the German tabloid Bild, he prayed for her during her last days.
In the 1962-movie Taras Bulba (DVD at AmazonUSA) Christine Kaufmann (as Natalia Dubrov) starred alongside Yul Brynner (as Taras Bulba) and Tony Curtis (as Andriy Bulba). Still a teenager, she married Tony Curtis the following year, after he had divorced from fellow actress Janet Leigh.
Christine Kaufmann was the second of six wives of Tony Curtis, with whom she had two children, Alexandra (*1964) and Allegra (*1966).
They starred again together in the 1964-movie Wild and Wonderful. However, Kaufmann and Curtis divorced in April 1968. Tony Curtis married a photo model just days after the divorce.
Alexandra and Allegra first stayed with their mother, who moved to Germany in 1969. The couple made headlines with their child custody fight. When the daughters were 6 and 8 and Christine was shooting a movie, Tony flew the girls without her consent from London to the United States. In the end, the children stayed with their father in the United States. According to Allegra Curtis, her mother did not care too much about their children. Luckily, there was the nanny. In 2013, Christine Kaufmann told German media that it was best for the children to stay with their rich and famous father; they all had US passports. For eight or nine years, she had only the right to see her daughters six weeks a year. Therefore, the children later came back to her to Germany. First Alexandra, and roughly a year and a half later Allegra followed.
Christine Kaufmann said about her divorce that she was one and green and, therefore, did not ask Tony Curtis for money. She later regretted it because, just before he died, he disinherited his children in favor of his last wife with whom he had no children.
In Germany, Christine Kaufmann continued her film career and starred in TV episodes of Der Kommissar and Derrick. She made movie such as Der Tod der Maria Malibran in 1971 and Willow Springs in 1973. In 1981, she shot two movies with the famous German director and actor Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Lili Marleen and Lola, in which she had the minor part of Susi; Barbara Sukowa played Lola. Memorable is the TV series by director Helmut Dietl Monaco Franze — Der ewige Stenz, in which she starred as Olga Behrens in 1982. In addition, Christine Kaufmann was a sidekick in 2 of the 24 episodes of the comedy series Harald und Eddi with Harald Juhnke and Eddi Arent.
Christine Kaufmann was not a nun and, in 2014, admitted some affairs, including sex with Eric Clapton, Patrick Süskind and Warren Beatty. Her most influential man was German film, opera and theatre director Peter Zadek, whom she loved all her life although they never became a couple, she told Bild in 2014.
In 1974 and in 1999, Christine Kaufmann posed nude for Playboy; even at 54, she still looked great. From 1999 until 2012, she marketed her own cosmetic and wellness products on the TV shopping channel HSE24. She could also be admired in many theatre plays. In addition, one has to mention Christine Kaufmann’s many books, three of which you can find on this page.
After her divorce from Tony Curtis, Christine Kaufmann was married to TV director Achim Lenz (1974-76), musician and actor Reno Eckstein (1979-1982) and illustrator Klaus Zey (1997-2011).
Christine Kaufmann: Lebenslust. Nymphenburger Verlag, 2014, 134 pages. Order the hardcover book in German from Amazon.com, Amazon.de.
Christine SchmidtmerShip Of Fools, poster, top from left: Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret, Oskar Werner, center from left: Jose Ferrer, Christiane Schmidtmer, George Segal, Elizabeth Ashley, Michael Dunn (bottom pointing), 1965. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Christiane Schmidtmer was born in 1939 in Mannheim, Germany. She was acting on German television when the actor Jose Ferrer recommended her to Stanley Kramer for “Ship of Fools” in 1965. She travelled to Hollywood to make the film with Ferrer, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner. While in the U.S. she also made “Boeing, Boeing” with Jerry Lewis and Tony Curtis.She divided her time between the U.S,. and Germany. She died in Heidelberg in 2003 at the age of 63.
Her IMDB entry:
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 modelling for German nude magazines and later, Playboy. She also modelled 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)
Dolph Lundgren was born in 1957 in Stockholm in Sweden. He came to fame with the popularity of action heroes who were muscleed and fit and adept at martial arts. Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal and Arnold Schwarzenegger were all very popular at the same time. Lundgren has a degress in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney. He made his film debut in the James Bond thriller “A View to a Kill” in 1985. His other films include “Rocky Four”, “Showdown in Little Toyko” and more recently “The Expendables”.
Men’s Health Interview:
Critics have never
been kind to Dolph Lundgren. They’ve call him “grinning and glistening” when they’re trying to be nice, and “expressive as wood” when they’re not. “Watching (Lundgren) think hard is a painful experience,” noted aWashington Post review of 1989’s Red Scorpion. “May well be the only man in the universe who can make Mr. (Jean-Claude) Van Damme look like an actor,” a New York Times critic wrote of Lundgren in 1992’s Universal Soldier. Film academic Christine Holmlund, summing up Lundgren’s career in the 2004 book Action and Adventure Cinema, wrote “Lundgren is limited by his size and dead pan delivery: though often compared to Arnold (Schwarzenegger), he has less range.”
For someone who’s had such a difficult time convincing critics of his merit, he’s one of the few action stars who gets respect (and real fear) from his audience. In 2009, three armed and masked burglars broke into Lundgren’s home in Marbella, Spain, tied up his wife, and went about ransacking the place. But then one of them noticed a Lundgren family photo in the bedroom and recognized the action star. He alerted his cohorts, and they made the unanimous decision to flee the crime scene immediately. Apparently they were less concerned with Lundgren’s wooden acting than his ability to break their collective faces. Perhaps they were afraid of ending up like Apollo Creed, who Lundgren famously “killed” in the 1985 filmRocky IV.
To be fair, it’s not completely irrational to be terrified by Lundgren. As Roger Moore, who worked with Lundgren in the James Bond film View To a Kill, once said “Dolph is larger than Denmark.” That’s hyperbole, but just slightly. Lundgren, a native of Stockholm, Sweden, stands at a golem-like 6 foot 5 inches and weighs in at around 250 pounds of pure neck-snapping muscle. Oh, and he also has a black belt in Kyokushin kaikan karate. While filming Rocky IV, he punched Sylvester Stallone so hard that he sent Sly to intensive care for nine days. If that’s not intimidating enough, he’s also smart. Lundgren has a masters in chemical engineering from the University of Sydney, and speaks five languages (Swedish, English, German, French and Japanese). He also dated musician Grace Jones during the 1980s, hung out at the infamous den of disco iniquity Studio 54, and lived in New York City when it was fun and dangerous.
Lundgren’s life has admittedly sometimes been more interesting than his movies. But in recent years, Lundgren has been on the verge of something like a comeback. He was the most two-dimensional part of 2010’s all-star action epic The Expendables, and he returns for the sequel, The Expendables 2, this Friday, August 17. It may not be thought-provoking cinema, but Lundgren’s performance should keep his house safe from burglars for at least another year.
I called Lundgren as he was waiting in LAX to board a flight to Madrid, as part of his world Expendables 2 media tour. He was soft-spoken, humble, and quick to laugh, particularly at himself. In other words, the exact opposite of every movie character he’s ever played.
Men’s Health:Expendables 2 has a lot of stars, and presumably a lot of egos. Did everybody get along?
Dolph Lundgren: Oh yeah. There was just a core group that worked together on most of the movie. It was Sly (Stallone) and me and Jason (Statham) and Terry (Crews) and Randy (Couture) and the Chinese guy, Jet Li. We were the ones working all the time. When guys like Bruce (Willis) and Arnold (Schwarzenegger) came in, it was just for a week or two. But everybody was excited to be part of a team and in a big movie. Some of these guys, like Chuck Norris, haven’t done a film in like seven years. So nobody came with big egos.
MH: Just big entourages?
DL: A few guys had that. They’d show up with a lot of people, especially Arnold and Chuck. Bodyguards and entourages, all that stuff.
MH: I understand the former Governator having bodyguards. But what does Chuck Norris need bodyguards for? I thought he could kill a guy with his pinkie.
DL:(Laughs.) I don’t know about that. Having bodyguards is just part of being famous, I think.
MH: How many bodyguards do you have?
DL: None.
MH: Because you don’t need them, or you could crack somebody’s spine just by staring at them?
DL:(Laughs.) I’m not that good.
MH: Among action stars, is there cheating?
DL: Cheating how?
MH: Like steroids. I talked to Charlie Sheen and he said he used steroids while he was making Major League. And that was a baseball movie.
DL:(Laughs.) That’s funny. Charlie took steroids? That’s probably the mildest form of drug he ever took. No, I like Charlie. I like him a lot. He’s a nice guy. But him saying he took steroids, that’s like me claiming I took aspirin. Anyway, what’s your question?
MH: Are steroids common in action movies? Part of the job requires having big, rippling, cinematic muscles. It must be tempting for some of these stars.
DL: Oh sure. It never was for me, because I was already a big guy when I started making movies. I didn’t need to be any bigger. So steroids didn’t make any sense. But if you’re a regular-sized actor and you’re in a movie where you’re supposed to be some pumped-up guy who takes his shirt off, yeah, steroids make sense.
MH: You’ve seen it?
DL: Well, I… (long pause.) I haven’t witnessed the injections personally. But I recognize when it’s happening. You know which guys are doing steroids and which ones aren’t.
MH: You can tell just by looking?
DL: Oh yeah. It’s pretty obvious. You can see the difference. There’s a soft roundness to steroid muscles that you don’t get when you’re lifting weights or doing martial arts or things like that. I don’t judge anybody. Everybody has their own life and people do what they want. It’s like smoking pot. If you experiment with it, it doesn’t mean you’re the devil, and it doesn’t mean you’ve ruined your body. It just means you tried it.
“Men;s Health” interview can also be accessed online here.
Karlheinz BoehmSissi, The Young Empress
Sissi, Die junge Kaiserin
Year: 1956 – Austria
Romy Schneider, Karlheinz Bohm
Director: Ernst Marischka
Poster, France.
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Karlheinz Boehm was born in 1928 in Darmstadt in Germany. He is the son of the famous conductor Karl Boehm. He palyed the Emperor Franz Josef opposite Romy Schneider in the three “Sissi” films in the 1950’s. He went on to make “Peeping Tom” for the famous British director Michael Powell in 1960. It was harshly reviewed when it first was released but is now regarded as a classic of repressed violence. He made “Come Fly With Me” with Dolores Hart in 1963. In his later years he has been very active in international charity work. He died in 2014.
His Wikipedia entry: Karlheinz Böhm (born 16 March 1928 in Darmstadt), sometimes referred to as Carl Boehm or Karl Boehm, is an Austrian actor and the only child of soprano Thea Linhard and conductor Karl Böhm. Böhm took part in 45 films and became famous in Germany for his role as Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in the Sissi trilogy and internationally for his role as Mark, the psychopathic protagonist of Peeping Tom, directed by Michael Powell. He is the founder of the trust Menschen für Menschen (“Humans for Humans”), which helps people in need in Ethiopia. He also received the Ethiopian honorary citizenship in 2003.
Having two citizenships, he sees himself as a world citizen: His father was born in Graz, his mother in Munich and today he lives in Grödig near Salzburg. He spent his youth inDarmstadt, Hamburg and Dresden. In Hamburg he attended elementary school and the Kepler-Gymnasium (a grammar school). A faked medical certificate[citation needed] enabled him to emigrate to Switzerland in 1939, where he attended the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, a boarding school. In 1946, he moved to Graz with his parents, where he graduated from high school the same year. He originally intended to become a pianist but received poor feedback when he auditioned. His father urged him to study English and German language and literary studies, followed by studies of history of arts for one semester in Rome after which he quit and returned to Vienna to take acting lessons with Prof. Helmut Krauss. From 1948 to 1976 he worked as a successful actor in about 45 films and also in theatre. With Romy Schneider, he starred in the Sissi trilogy as the Emperor Franz Joseph which limited him to one specific genre as an actor.
Between 1974 and 1975, Böhm appeared prominently in four consecutive films from prolific New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Martha, Effi Briest, Faustrecht der Freiheit (aka Fistfight of Freedom or Fox and His Friends), and Mutter Küsters’ Fahrt zum Himmel (Mother Küsters’ Trip to Heaven).
Bohm’s voice acting work has included narrating his father’s 1975 recording of Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev and in 2009 as the German voice for Charles Muntz, villain in Pixar‘s tenth animated feature Up.
Since 1981, when he founded Menschen für Menschen (“Humans for Humans”), Böhm has been actively involved in charitable work in Ethiopia, for which in 2007 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood among Peoples. Karlheinz Böhm has been married to Almaz Böhm, a native of Ethiopia, since 1991. They have two children, Nicolas (born 1990) and Aida (born 1993). Böhm has five more children from previous marriages, among them, the actress Katharina Böhm (born 1964). In 2011 Almaz and Karlheinz Böhm were awarded the Essl Social Prize for the project Menschen für Menschen.[1]
Among contrasting roles in the career of the actor Karlheinz Böhm, who has died aged 86, were a romantic portrayal of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria in the hugely popular trio of Sissi films (1955, 1956, 1957), the creepy title role in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and unsympathetic characters in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the 1970s. In addition, as befitted the son of the great Austrian conductor Karl Böhm and the soprano Thea Linhard, he portrayed Schubert in Blossom Time (1958) and Beethoven in The Magnificent Rebel (1962).
Born in Darmstadt, Germany, where his father had recently been appointed director of music, Böhm studied philosophy at the University of Graz, Austria. Although his parents arranged for him to take piano lessons at an early age, he was not interested in a musical career, and instead pursued his passion for acting. So, in 1948, he went to Vienna to work as assistant to the director Karl Hartl on The Angel With the Trumpet, in which he also had a bit part Böhm’s first leading role was in 1952 in Alraune (Mandragore), the fifth version of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel of a child born to a prostitute by artificial insemination from a hanged man, who grows up to be a soulless femme fatale. Böhm, boyishly naive, falls in love with Alraune (Hildegard Knef), the creation of his mad scientist uncle (Erich von Stroheim). It began a series of roles for Böhm as a handsome, rather wooden juvenile lead in a number of insignificant films during a particularly fallow period of German cinema. Then came Sissi (1955), in which Böhm played Franz Joseph opposite Romy Schneider’s Princess Elizabeth of Austria. This was followed by Sissi, the Young Empress (1956) and Sissi: The Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). These kitschy Technicolor costume dramas, part operetta, part Hollywood-style biopic, proved immensely popular, and Böhm became a matinee idol.
Therefore, many filmgoers were shocked to see him in Powell’s disturbing thriller Peeping Tom (1960) as a serial killer of women, who records the fear and dying contortions of his victims on film. Böhm (whose slight German accent went unexplained) was Mark Lewis, whose childhood is haunted by his sadistic psychologist father (played by the director). Powell cast Böhm, because he thought he might know what it was like to be the son of an overbearing father. Böhm’s performance is the more chilling because the character is ostensibly a normal young man with whom the audience can identify. The critical outrage against the film almost finished Powell’s career, while for Böhm it began a new phase in English-language films and more international recognition. He played a French journalist hanging around a seamy Soho strip club, in Too Hot to Handle (1960), featuring Jayne Mansfield; one of the storytelling brothers (the other was Laurence Harvey, very different in looks and accent) in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962); and an SS officer in Vincente Minnelli’s leaden The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1962). It was for Walt Disney Productions that he appeared as a brooding and intense Beethoven in the highly fictionalised The Magnificent Rebel. One risible scene had Beethoven getting inspiration for the first notes of his 5th Symphony from the landlord rapping on his door to ask for the rent. Most of his subsequent films did little for his image, appearing as he did as charming villains in the fluffy Come Fly with Me (1963) – as a German baron using a flight attendant (Dolores Hart) for his smuggling plans – and the tepid spy spoof The Venetian Affair (1967). During the same period, he directed a few operas, including Elektra in Stuttgart and Tosca in Graz.
In 1968, a change came about the hitherto apolitical Böhm, prompted by the birth of the German student movement that year. “I was acting in Frankfurt at the time,” he recalled. “I was sitting in a trendy bar when a group of demonstrators went past. I couldn’t understand what made a bunch of young, well-off people take to the streets. But I started asking questions, and could see that we all have to take a moral and ethical stand.” A few years later, he met the radical film-maker Fassbinder, who deepened aspects of Böhm’s screen persona in four films. In Martha (1974), Böhm, as a brutal husband, brilliantly displays the sadism that was masked in Peeping Tom. He is a world-weary counsellor in Effi Briest (1975), a smooth antiques dealer in Fox and His Friends (1975) and a manipulative wealthy communist in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975).
In 1981, Böhm was a celebrity guest on the popular television game show Wetten, dass…? (Wanna bet?) and bet that fewer than one in three people watching would donate at least one deutschmark or one Swiss franc to Ethiopia, the world’s third-poorest country. As a result, he raised the impressive sum of 1.2m marks, and went on to establish the charitable organisation Menschen für Menschen (People for People), raising money for the people of Ethiopia. Ten years later, in 1991, Böhm married (as his fourth wife) Almaz Teshome, an Ethiopian archaeologist. She later served on the board of the charity, becoming its chair in 2011. Boehm was made an honorary Ethiopian citizen in 2001. “Because they have recognised I didn’t come as a stranger, to show them what they have to do to get out of their poverty,” he explained. “No. I tried to find out what the people are missing, and how they can help themselves. My heart has become deeply Ethiopian in the deepest sense of the word. I don’t live only for myself any more, but I live for other people.”
Among Böhm’s several awards was the Berlinale Camera at the 2008 Berlin film festival. He is survived by Almaz , their two children, and five other children from his previous marriages, who include the actor Katerina Böhm.
• Karlheinz Böhm, actor and charity campaigner, born 16 March 1928; died 29 May 2014
Jurgen Prochnow was born in Berlin in 1941. He studied acting at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen. His first filn was “One or the Other of Us” in 1974. He came to international prominence with the success of “Das Boot” in 1981. He went on to make films in the U.S. including “Dune” and “Beverly Hills Cop Two”.
His TCM biography|:
The ruggedly handsome, severe-looking German-born actor Jurgen Prochnow first achieved notice in his homeland for his work in “Die Verrohung des Franz Blum/The Brutalization of Franz Blum” (1974) and in “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” (1975), co-directed by Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe Von Trotta. But it was as the captain of the ill-fated submarine in Wolfgang Petersen’s gripping WWII drama “Das Boot” (1981) that his career really took flight, earning him international recognition. Since his US film debut in “Comeback” (1982), Prochnow has tackled a steady diet of supporting characters, often humorless men of German extraction such as his sinister Captain Stolz in “A Dry White Season (1989) and the brutal Nazi interrogator in Anthony Minghella’s Oscar-winning “The English Patient” (1996).
Splitting his time between stage and screen throughout the 1970s, Prochnow established his most significant screen collaboration with Petersen, with whom he worked on the 1970 TV series “Harbor at the Rhine River” and the features “Einer von uns Beider/One or the Other” (1973), about an outsider trying to insinuate his way into high society, and “Die Konsequenz/The Consequence” (1977), a based-on-fact story of a homosexual prisoner who falls in love with the son of a guard. Following the success of “Das Boot”, Prochnow curtailed his theatrical ventures as his profile in international features increased, although he did tour Germany for four months in Arthur Miller’s “The Price” in 1989. On the big screen, one of his more interesting roles came as the mysterious boarder in “The Seventh Sign” (1988), starring Demi Moore. It was a part that required a balance between being both realistic and mystical while also demanding he wander continuously through and stand in the rain. The constant drenching might have daunted another actor but not one like Prochnow who had weathered the claustrophobic filming on the U-boat set. “A little rain is nothing. This is easy after ‘Das Boot’.”
Prochnow next starred in “The Man Inside”(1990), playing a West German journalist who g s undercover at a tabloid magazine to expose their unethical practices, revealing a government conspiracy to discredit a liberal politician. In “The Fourth War” (1990), Prochnow was a colonel in the Soviet army engaging in a personal battle with his American counterpart (Roy Scheider) at a boarder post between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. After playing a sailboat skipper battling the elements and personal demons on a journey from Gibraltar to Barbados in the straight-to-video thriller “Kill Cruise” (1991), Prochnow pursued the fugitive menace, “Robin Hood” (Fox, 1991), throughout Sherwood forest. A small part in “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (1992) was followed by a meatier role as the sadistic leader of a terrorist group that hijacks a stealth bomber from the Air Force in “Interceptor” (1992).
Prochnow continued his penchant for low-grade, straight-to-video fair with “Hurricane Smith” (1992), playing a drug kingpin who reaps the whirlwind when he kills the sister of a badass Texan (Carl Weathers). He again played the heavy in “The Last Border” (1993), a post-apocalyptic thriller about a group of outlaws fighting against a militaristic government after most of the world’s population had been killed off by suffocating pollution. After playing a creepy physician in the cheekily titled “Body of Evidence” (1993), a trashy noir thriller starring Madonna as a femme fatale on trial for murdering a millionaire with rough sex, Prochnow was a rogue Russian spy trying to stop an American CIA agent (Timothy Dalton) in the Lifetime miniseries, “Lie Down with Lions” (1994). Back in the feature world, Prochnow upped his profile with a role as a corrupt judge allied with the evil brother (Armand Assante) of a futuristic lawman (Sylvester Stallone) in the dismal “Judge Dredd” (1995).
Prochnow continued to appear in more accessible features throughout the mid- to late-1990s, including “In the Mouth of Madness” (1995) in which he played a famed horror writer in the vein of Stephen King who g s missing from the small New England town that serves as the eerie setting for his terrifying novels. After playing a Nazi torturer responsible for removing the thumbs from a British spy (Willem Daf ) in “The English Patient” (1996), Prochnow had a nearly silent role in “Air Force One” (1997), playing a right-wing general from Kazakhstan who’s the reason for terrorists kidnapping the President of the United States (Harrison Ford) aboard his well-protected airplane. In the made-for-TV sci-fi thriller, “DNA” (1997), he was a run-of-the-mill mad scientist wreaks havoc on the world by recreating an alien being that had been stranded on earth centuries earlier through an unorthodox DNA experiment. Playing the arch villain yet again, Prochnow was a vile henchman sent to kill an assassin (Chow Yun-Fat) unwilling to follow through on murdering a police officer (Michael Rooker) for a Chinatown crime boss (Kenneth Tsang) in “The Replacement Killers” (1998).
Prochnow was finally on the right side of the law in “The Human Bomb” (1998), playing the head of an anti-terrorist unit sent to diffuse the so-called Ecobomber who holds an American teacher (Patsy Kensit) and her students ransom for 50 million marks which he wants to be used in his efforts to help the poor and clean up the planet. He appeared in two more made-for-television movies- “Heaven’s Fire” (Fox Family Channel, 1999), a heist thriller involving the theft of $100 bill engraving plates from the U.S. Treasury, and “Esther” (PAX, 1999), the story of the Biblical queen of Persia who saved the Jews from genocide-before going back to features with “Wing Commander” (1999), a misguided take on the once-popular series of video games in which he played a federation commander in the year 2654. Prochnow rounded out the millennium with “The Last Stop” (1999), a straight-to-video thriller about a group of strangers stranded inside a remote mountain lodge during a raging storm-only top discover that one of them is a murderer.
Despite some appearances in several Hollywood blockbusters, Prochnow had difficulty making a household name for himself even though most would have recognized his face. After appearing in a few straight-to-video action thrillers-“The Last Run” (2001), “The Elite” (2001) and “Gunblast Vodka” (2001)-Prochnow shifted gears with a supporting role in the biting independent dramedy, “Jack the Dog” (2001). Two more cheap releases-“Dark Asylum” (2001) and “Ripper” (2002)-were followed by a degrading appearance in “House of the Dead” (2003) as a barge captain named Kirk who ferries a group of spoiled college brats to an island where certain death awaits them in the form of zombies the control of an undead Spanish priest (David Palffy). Unintentional laughs and box office failure ensued. Meanwhile, he had a small supporting role in the straight-to-video release, “Heart of America: Homeroom” (2005), a teen-angst drama about two high school seniors who commit to a murder-suicide pact to take weapons to school and exact revenge upon their tormentors.
Prochnow received his highest profile role with “See Arnold Run” (A&E, 2005), playing the older version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ridiculous and often painful biopic of the former bodybuilder and movie star-turned-Governator of Kahl-eee-fornia. While more than a few critics blasted the movie for being cheap and schmaltzy, particular scorn was heaped on Prochnow-everything from his awkward performance to his lack of resemblance to Schwarzenegger was called into question. He next fell into his fallback position as ruthless villain for “The Celestine Prophecy” (2006), a spiritual adventure about a man (Matthew Settle) who travels to Peru in pursuit of an ancient manuscript containing the so-called Nine Insights. Continuing along with religious-themed material, Prochnow next appeared in one of the most anticipated and controversial films in decades, “The Da Vinci Code” (2006), directed by Ron Howard from Dan Brown’s mega-bestselling novel, which told the story of a famed symbologist (Tom Hanks) who is called to the Louvre where the murder of a curator has left behind a trail of mysterious symbols and clues leading to a secret society that has spent the past 2000 years guarding a secret that could destroy the very foundations of society if it were revealed.
His TCM biography can be accessed online at TCM here.
ticle in “The Telegraph”:
Mark Monahan continues our profiles of cinema’s unsung heroes
It’s said that Jürgen Prochnow was considered for the role of the Terminator in James Cameron’s 1984 chase-movie, and certainly there’s a steely intensity to the 6ft 1in German actor that would have made him a scary killer.
Born in 1941, he was a regular on German television when his countryman Wolfgang Peterson made him the lead in his 1981 U-boat drama Das Boot.
Prochnow brought immense dignity to his beleaguered submariner, sparking a successful, often martial career in German and American movies. He was a captain in Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983), a major in The English Patient (1996) and a general in Air Force One (1997).
And, to judge by its £30 million or so UK takings to date, there’s barely a British soul who hasn’t clocked him recently as André Vernet in The Da Vinci Code, a typically strong performance in an undeserving film.
Helmut Griem was a German actor whose best known role internationally was in 1972 in “Cabaret” with Liza Minnelli and Michael York. He was born in Hamburg in 1932. His other films include “The Damned” and “Ludwig” both directed by Luchino Visconti. He made the “McKenzie Break” in Ireland. He died in 2004 aged 72.
His obituary from “The Independent”:
Helmut Griem, actor: born Hamburg, Germany 6 April 1932; died Munich, Germany 19 November 2004. Blond and handsome, Helmut Griem was one of the few German actors to become internationally successful. Equally at home on screen, on television or on the stage, where he played in both classical and modern roles, including musicals, he will be best remembered by mainstream audiences for his appearance in Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret (1972). Griem played Max, the decadent, bisexual baron, described by Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) as “divinely sexy”, and few will forget the moment in the film when the exasperated writer Brian (Michael York) angrily tells Sally, “Screw Max!”, to which she softly responds, “I do.” After a brief silence, he shakes her repose by replying, “So do I.” Helmut Griem was perfect as the arrogant, aristocratic and fun-loving playboy who shrugs his shoulders with indifference when his friend Brian points out the chilling portents, as they witness members of the Hitler Youth singing their anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. Earlier, Griem had made his breakthrough as a film actor when cast by Luchino Visconti in The Damned (1969) as Aschenbach, the cruelly cynical SS officer, whose lust for power knows no bounds. Born in Hamburg in 1932, Griem planned to be a journalist, but, after studying literature, science and philosophy, he developed an interest in acting, and made his stage début with a role in N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker (1956). For over a decade he worked mainly in the theatre, in Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin and Munich, his roles including the frustrated professor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. He made his screen début in Fabrik der Offiziere (1960), but his first important film role was in a screen version of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami (1968). His screen potential was fully realised in The Damned, Visconti’s dramatisation dealing with the Krupp family whose steel empire assisted Hitler’s rise to power. Griem was both cruel and seductive as the SS officer who insidiously gains control of the steelworks. In Lamont Johnson’s tautly gripping The McKenzie Break (1970), which dealt with the rare subject of German prisoners in an Allied prisoner-of- war camp, Griem was a captured U-boat captain who organises a well-planned escape. Though again cruel and calculating (he calmly lets a hut roof collapse, killing his commanding officer and fellow prisoners, because the distraction will aid his escape), he invested the character with human qualities and subtle shadings that made his battle of wits with the prison officer (Brian Keith) intensely compelling. Griem worked for Visconti again in the spectacular but hollow biography Ludwig (1972), and in 1975 he starred in the Israeli-British co- production Children of Rage, which took a thoughtful if over-talkative look at the issues behind the violence in Palestine, as seen by an Israeli doctor (Griem) at a refugee camp. Voyage of the Damned (1976) was a star- laden vehicle telling the true story of Jewish refugees stranded on an ocean liner in 1939. He was part of another starry cast, including Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Rod Steiger and Curt Jurgens, in Breakthrough (1979), a splendid sequel to Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron (1977). Griem played Major Stransky, the ambitious officer portrayed by Maximilian Schell in the earlier film. The following year he starred in Phillip Braun’s The Glass Cell, a German version of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller. In 1980 he was seen on television in Fassbinder’s classic mini-series Berlin Alexanderplatz, and most of his career afterwards was on stage or television. His TV roles included that of Alexander Menshikov in the mini-series Peter the Great (1986) and Rommel in The Plot to Kill Hitler (1990). In the theatre, he made acclaimed appearances in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane, J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. In 1997 he triumphed as Willie Loman in a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. He made his final television appearance two years ago in an episode of the popular crime series SK Kolsch. Tom Vallance
Website dedicated to Helmut Griem, please click here.
Helmut Dantine was born in Vienna in 1917. In 1938 during the Anchluss, he was captured and placed in a Nazi concentration camp. His parents managed to get him released and he escaped to Calfornia. His parents were later to perish in a con centration camp. His first film was “International Squadron” in 1941. The following year he played the German flyer harboring in Greer Garson’s garden in “Mrs Miniver”. Among his other films are “Mission to Moscow”, “Northern Pursuit” and “To Be or Not To Be”. He also became a wealthy businessman. He died in 1982 aged 64.
His IMDB mini biography:
Actor/director/producer Helmut Dantine was born in Vienna, Austria on October 7, 1917. He made a name for himself as an actor during World War Two playing German soldiers and Nazi villains in Hollywood films, most notably in Mrs. Miniver (1942). The young Dantine was a fervent anti-fascist/anti-Nazi activist in Vienna. As a leader in the anti-Nazi youth movement the 19-year old was summarily rounded up and imprisoned at the Rosserlaende concentration camp. Family influence persuaded a physician to grant him a medical release that June and he was immediately sent to Los Angeles to stay with the only friend they had in America. Dantine joined the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was spotted by a Warner Bros. talent scout who was struck by Dantine’s dark good looks. Signed to a Warner’s contract, he appeared in a variety of films after making his debut as a Nazi in International Squadron (1941) starring Ronald Reagan. He played supporting, second lead and eventually, lead roles in such films as Casablanca (1942) (where he was the newlywed who gambles away his visa money), Edge of Darkness (1943) (his first lead), the infamous Mission to Moscow (1943) and Passage to Marseille (1944). Two of his best films came on loan-out from Warners in 1942: Ernst Lubitsch‘s comic masterpiece To Be or Not to Be (1942) and William Wyler‘s Oscar-winning Mrs. Miniver(1942). Dantine directed the the unsuccessful Thundering Jets (1958). His wife, Niki Dantine, was the daughter of Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck, the overall boss of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer — ostensibly the most powerful man in Hollywood since 1927. After Schenck was forced out of Loew’s, the wily old movie veteran formed his own production and distribution company. In 1959, Dantine’s acting career was on the wane and his attempt to become a director a relative failure, he became a producer. He was appointed vice-president of his father-in-law’s Schenck Enterprises, eventually becoming president of the company in 1970. Dantine produced three minor Sam Peckinpah films in the mid-1970s, including Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) and The Killer Elite (1975) in both of which,he had small supporting roles. Helmut Dantine died on May 2, 1982, at age 64. in Beverly Hills after suffering a massive heart attack. His body was interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.
