Horst Buchholz

Actor known as Germany's James Dean

Horst Werner Buchholz, actor: born Berlin 4 December 1933; married 1958 Myriam Bru (one son, one daughter); died Berlin 3 March 2003

The German actor Horst Buchholz is best known for his part as one of the seven cowboys in the Hollywood western classic The Magnificent Seven (1960), but this was just one of around 50 films he appeared in between 1954 and 2000. Even before his role in The Magnificent Seven, Bucholz had had leading roles in 13 other German, British, American and French films. He owed his success to his good looks, versatility and, not least, his great acting ability. His language skills helped. In addition to his native German, he learned French, Russian, Italian and Spanish.

Born in 1933 in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, the son of a shoemaker, he was one of thousands of children evacuated to the Silesian countryside to avoid Allied bombing in the Second World War. His war ended in a children's home in Czechoslovakia.

He returned in 1945 to a shattered, divided and chaotic Berlin. Yet he remained a loyal Berliner to the end of his life. He left school early, attempting to earn a living through stage acting, and landed his first stage role at 15 in a Berlin theatre version of Erich Kästner's children's classic Emil and the Detectives. Having been born in what became the Soviet sector of Berlin, where the theatre was encouraged, he had minor stage parts there before seeking work in West Berlin.

During his youth Buchholz frequently appeared on radio and stage; he entered films as a voice-over actor in the dubbing of foreign pictures. His first (uncredited) screen appearance was in 1952. After appearing at the Schiller Theatre, West Berlin, where he had done his training for the stage, he was discovered by the director Julien Duvivier, who gave him his first proper screen role in Marianne de ma jeunesse (Marianne of My Youth, 1954). The following year he appeared in Helmut Käutner's Himmel ohne Sterne (Sky Without Stars), for which he won the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor award.

Buchholz broke through as a major star after playing the title role in the internationally successful Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (The Confessions of Felix Krull, 1957), based on Thomas Mann's last novel. He played the leading role opposite Karin Baal in Die Halbstarken (Wolfpack, 1956), a drama dealing with rebellious youth, which led to his being dubbed Germany's James Dean, and the film was certainly influenced by Rebel without a Cause. Buchholz had become Germany's first pop star.

In 1959, he was cast as a doomed Polish seaman, who had committed a crime of passion, in the British film Tiger Bay. Set in Cardiff, it also starred 12-year-old Hayley Mills and her father, John Mills.

Buchholz's growing international popularity brought him a major part in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961). Here he was on home territory. The film, a fast-moving farce, is set in divided Berlin with James Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive and Buchholz as an anti-American East German official. All ends well when Buchholz sees the error of his ways. The part gave him a chance to show off his ability to handle comedy.

Indeed, Buchholz was really versatile and in the following years he took on roles in adventure yarns, horror movies, wartime dramas and spy thrillers. He would play good guys and bad guys. He was Cervantes in the film of the same name (a.k.a. The Young Rebel, 1966), and a "good German" in the Italian Second World War drama Da Dunkerque alla vittoria (From Hell to Victory, 1979). In Berlin Tunnel 21 (1981), a CBS production, he was an engineer overseeing the construction of an escape tunnel. In 1985, he was back in the Second World War in the espionage drama Code Name: Emerald, set in Paris. In the harrowing I skrzypce przestaly grac (And the Violins Stopped Playing, 1988) he took on the difficult role of a gypsy violinist in occupied Warsaw who, despite escape attempts, ends up in Auschwitz.

In the 1990s, Buchholz was prepared to take lesser parts often in action movies, such as Touch and Die (1991) about plutonium theft and shady nuclear arms deals and, the rather silly Aces: Iron Eagles III (1992). In 1997, with some reluctance, he played Dr Lessing, a Nazi concentration camp doctor, in Roberto Benigni's internationally acclaimed Life is Beautiful, the tragiccomedy Holocaust story.

After playing a lady's man for many years, Buchholz reportedly admitted to the weekly Bunte magazine in 2000 that he had bisexual tendencies. Whatever the truth, he remained married to his French wife Myriam Bru.

David Childs

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