European Actors Archives - Page 24 of 28

Rossano Brazzi

Rossano Brazzi was born in Bologna, Italy in 1916. He was raised in the city of Florence. He began his career in Italian films in 1938 with “Il destino in tasca”. In 1949 he went to Hollywood to make “Little Women” with June Allyson, Margaret O’Brien and Elizabeth Taylor. He returned to Italy shortly thereafterand resumed his career in Europe. In 1954 he starred in “Three Coins in the Fountain” and thus began twelve years of high profile films including “South Pacific” with Mitzi Gaynor perhaps his most wekk known role. He starred opposite some of the great ladies of the silver screen including Katharine Hepburn, Olivia de Havilland, Deborah Kerr, Maureen O’Hara, Joan Fontaine and Suzanne Pleshette. He died in 1994 at the age of 78.

Dark Purpose, poster, (aka L’INTRIGO), US poster, from top: Shirley Jones, Rossano Brazzi, George Sanders, Micheline Presle, Giorgia Moll, 1964. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Rossano Brazzi’s obituary from “The Independent” newspaper by David Shipman:

As Hollywood’s enormous audience decamped to television in the 1950s the American film industry looked to Europe to help it out. The movie stars of Germany, France and Italy were imported in the hope that their American films would attract large audiences in their native countries. Sophia Loren made it big in the United States after a shaky start. Vittorio Gassmann, arguably the most versatile of the Italians, found it hard to find his niche in America. So for several years Rossano Brazzi was Hollywood’s favourite Italian male, a romantic figure, impeccably groomed and doubtless planning seduction over a candle-lit dinner for two in a Roman trattoria.

This was a role Brazzi played several times – if more successfully in the US than in Italy. After a short stage career Brazzi entered films in 1939, but his only Italian movie of this period to have entered the international repertory is La Tosca (1940),started by Jean Renoir but finished by Carl Koch after the French embassy had advised Renoir to leave the country as more and more Germans poured into Rome.

Given the subject – Rome at the time of Napoleonic invasion – the analogy could not have been lost on Renoir, or on Renoir’s compatriot Michel Simon, who stayed to complete his role as Scarpia. Imperio Argento, a popular actress of her day, was miscast as Tosca, but Brazzi fared better as her Cavaradossi.

La Tosca was not seen in the US until 1947, the third of Brazzi’s pictures to appear there almost simultaneously, attracting the attention of Mervyn Le Roy at MGM, who chose Brazzi to play the professor to June Allyson’s Jo in the second sound version ofLittle Women (1949). He was both strong and sympathetic in the part, qualities little in demand in most of his other English-language movies.

He did not, in fact, return to Italy until 20th Century-Fox filmed John H. Secondari’s novel about three American girls involved in amorous adventures while working in Rome, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), directed by Jean Negulesco. One of the women was played by Jean Peters, who gets Brazzi sacked because the staff aren’t supposed to fraternise with the locals: but because he isn’t exactly pleased when she thinks she’s pregnant by him the role hardly showed him in a pleasant light.

Nor did that in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Joseph Mankiewicz’s analysis of a movie star – Ava Gardner, playing someone very much like herself. Brazzi was the Italian aristocrat who confesses after marriage to her that he’s impotent. Mankiewicz thoughtthe film weakened because he himself did not have the courage to carry out his original intention of making the count homosexual.

The two films typecast Brazzi as a Latin lover likely to be not all what he seems. In David Lean’s Summer Madness (1955) he is the Venetian antiquarian attracting a middle-aged spinster secretary from the mid-West, played by Katharine Hepburn. He may be her first and last fling; she bites her lip on realising that she is only the latest in a long line of adulteries.

In Interlude (1957), he is again married, again seducing an American working in Europe, June Allyson; in The Story of Esther Costello he is a seedy but suave con man who tries to rape the orphan charge of his wife, Joan Crawford. In his third film that year, Legion of the Lost, he journeys into the Sahara with his true love, Sophia Loren, but deserts her when she refuses to let him have his way with her, later trying to kill John Wayne as he digs for water.

This was hardly a CV likely to qualify him for one of the most important movie roles available in 1958. On Broadway, South Pacific had been a triumph for Rodgers and Hammerstein and for Joshua Logan, who directed and who had written the book with Hammerstein.

Brazzi was cast for the film version as the ageing French Polynesian planter who captures the heart of an American nurse, though his singing voice was dubbed Giorgio Tozzi; but even among all the niceness Brazzi’s character remained somewhat dubious, having fathered two children by local women.

The film’s huge success was of no benefit to Brazzi. He continued to work, but chiefly in supporting roles. There were two notable exceptions: Negulesco’s Count Your Blessings (1959), in which he was a French playboy incapable of fidelity to Deborah Kerr, and The Battle of the Via Favorita (1965) as the widower whose re-marriage – to Maureen O’Hara – shocks their children

. He also directed himself in the Italo-American The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t (1965) and, under the pseudonym Edward Ross, SalvareLa Faccia (1969), a.k.a. Psychout for Murder. He also appeared in US teleseries such as Hawaii Five-O, Charlie’s Angels and Hart to Hart.

David Shipman

The “Independent” newspaper obituary can also be accessed here

Claudia Cardinale TCM Overview.

Claudia Cardinale was born in Tunisia of Italian parents in 1938. In 1957 she won a beauty contest which brought her to the Venice Film Festival. Her firt film was the same year in “Goha”. She worked with Luchino Visconti in “Rocco and his Brothers” and “The Leopard”. She starred with Peter Sellers, Capucine and David Niven in “The Pink Panther” in 1963 and with John Wayne and Rita Hayworth in “Circus World”. In 1965 she was in Hollywood making “Blindfold” with Rock Hudson and “The Professionals” with Burt Lancaster. In Spain in 1968 she made the classic epic Western “Once Upon A Time in the West” with Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. She lives in Paris.

“Claudia Cardinale , with her alluring eyes and husky voice, was one of the more desirable European imports of the 1960s and her hesitation with the English language only made made her that much more appealing” – Barry Monush in “The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors”. (2003).

TCM overview:

Though the international film market was glutted with sultry European actresses during the 1960s, few could boast the depth and range of talent as Claudia Cardinale. Blessed with an extraordinary face and figure, Cardinale began her career as lovely window dressing in films like “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958). But she soon proved to the cinematic community that her screen abilities were far greater than her photogenic nature, as evidenced by nuanced turns in “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961), Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963) and Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard.” By the mid-1960s, she rivaled such fellow international stars as Sophia Loren and Catherine Denueve in worldwide popularity, but after starring in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1969), she retreated to European features, where she continued to hone her craft in films like Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). Fondly remembered by movie fans the world over for her equally dazzling looks and talent, Cardinale remained the definition of a true movie star for over five decades.

She was born Claude Josephine Rose Cardinale (pronounced “Car-din-arl-ay”) to French and Sicilian parents on April 15, 1938 in La Goulette, a predominately Italian neighborhood in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. She grew up speaking her mother’s native language, French, and Tunisian Arabic, and did not learn Italian until she began her acting career. Initially, Cardinale wanted to be a teacher, but after entering and winning a 1957 contest to find the “most beautiful Italian girl in Tunisia,” her path to film stardom was set. The first prize was a trip to the Venice Film Festival, where her earthy beauty captured the attention of the European press. After a two-month stint at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National film school), Cardinale made her feature film debut in Jacques Baratier’s “Goha” (1957), starring Omar Sharif. She then received a seven-year contract from Vides Cinematografica, a production company run by producer Franco Cristaldi who, like Cardinale, had been born in Tunis.

What Cristaldi did not know was that Cardinale was pregnant at the time of their meeting. The French father was in Tunisia, and had stated that he wanted nothing to do with his offspring. Realizing that to sign Cardinale in such a state would fly in the face of his company’s contract clauses which forbade weight gain and unnecessary fraternization, Cristaldi arranged for Cardinale to deliver the child, a boy named Patrick Frank, in London in 1958. He was then placed in the care of nuns in Italy until the age of 4 ½, when Cardinale’s family cared for him in Tunis. As part of the arrangement, the boy was told that Cardinale was his older sister, not her son. Meanwhile, Cristaldi had brought Cardinale back to Italy, where he began grooming her as a starlet in the mold of Brigitte Bardot. She earned her first international hit with Mario Monicelli’s “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (1958), a fizzy crime farce about a group of hapless criminals who attempt and fail to break into a pawnshop. Cardinale had a minor role as the object of desire, a young girl kept a virtual prisoner by her over-protective husband. A major hit around the world, “Big Deal” thrust Cardinale into the international spotlight.

Though many of Cardinale’s early roles were built largely around her physical attributes, she soon proved herself to be a capable dramatic and comedic actress in a wide variety of films for some of the most acclaimed Italian directors of the 1960s. In “Bell’Antonio” (1960), co-written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, she played the wife of Marcello Mastroianni, whose confusion over sex and love made him a renowned lover with strangers but impotent with her. Luchino Visconti cast her in a minor role in his iconic, neo-realist masterpiece “Rocco and His Brothers” (1960), and she gave a heartbreaking turn as a mistreated showgirl who became the romantic obsession of a teenage boy in Valerio Zurlini’s “Girl with a Suitcase” (1961). By 1963, she had appeared in two of the greatest titles in world cinema – Federico Fellini’s “8 ½” (1963), in which she essentially played herself, an actress named Claudia cast by director Marcello Mastroianni as the “perfect woman,” and Visconti’s criminally underrated “The Leopard” (1963), as the object of unrequited passion by an Italian nobleman (Burt Lancaster) and his nephew (Alain Delon). These and other films helped to mint Cardinale as the thinking man’s sex symbol, and as an actress who could dazzle with her brain as well as her beauty. However, many moviegoers did not know that another actress dubbed her voice in nearly all of her films prior to 1963. At first, this was due to her rudimentary Italian, but as time wore on and her grasp of the language improved, producers continued to rely on dubbing because of her odd pronunciation – Cardinale was, in fact, speaking Italian with a French accent and in a surprisingly deep tone. The first time her actual voice was heard on film was in Fellini’s “8 1/2″.”

American audiences soon took notice of the actress as well, and she made her Hollywood debut in Blake Edwards’ “The Pink Panther” (1963) as a Middle Eastern princess whose prized possession – the titular jewel – is stolen by a master thief, “The Phantom” (David Niven), who is being sought out by Peter Sellers’ inept Inspector Clouseau. More Stateside features followed, including the thriller “Blindfold” (1965) with Rock Hudson, and Richard Brooks’ thrilling Western “The Professionals” (1966), with Cardinale as the wife of an American rancher (Ralph Bellamy) kidnapped by a Mexican bandit (Jack Palance), who is then pursued by a quartet of mercenaries led by Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin. During this period, Cardinale also maintained her European career in such films as Visconti’s “Vaghe stele dell’Orsa” (“Stella”) (1965) in which she played a Holocaust survivor who returns to her home in Tuscany to re-ignite an incestuous relationship with her brother.

The following year, while filming the sex comedy “Don’t Make Waves” with Tony Curtis in Los Angeles, Cardinale revealed the truth about her son to the international press. She had fallen in love with her mentor, Cristaldi, who had applied to the Vatican to annul his marriage in order to wed Cardinale. The couple was married in Georgia before returning to Italy to break the news to Patrick. The announcement shocked many fans, but in interviews, both Cristaldi and Cardinale explained that the revelation was made to prevent any negative publicity from affecting the boy. Cardinale soon returned to making films on both sides of the Atlantic; some remarkable, while others modest regional hits or obscurities. The most acclaimed picture during this period was unquestionably Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), the sprawling coda to his “Dollars” trilogy of post-modern Westerns. She played Jill, the woman at the center of a violent, three-way power struggle between a hired gun (Henry Fonda), the mysterious stranger bent on killing him (Charles Bronson), and the bandit (Jason Robards) whom Fonda framed for the murder of Cardinale’s husband. Met with critical and audience disdain upon its release, “Once Upon a Time” was eventually regarded as Leone’s greatest work and one of the finest Westerns ever made.

After her work in the Leone film, Cardinale appeared almost exclusively in European features, many of which never reached American theaters. There were several notable films during this period, including 1969’s “The Red Tent,” an Italian/Soviet production about the 1928 crash of an Italian airship near the North Pole which starred Sean Connery and Peter Finch, and “Bello, onesto, emigrato Australia sposerebbe compaesana illibata” (“A Girl in Australia”) (1971), a romantic comedy with Alberto Sordi which earned her a 1972 David for Best Actress. In 1977, she appeared on American television in Franco Zefferelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” (NBC, 1977) as the adulteress Jesus (Robert Powell) spared from stoning in the Gospel of John. The six-hour miniseries allowed her to return to her native Tunisia, which stood in for Jerusalem.

In 1981, Cardinale played Klaus Kinski’s lover, a brothel owner who finances his mad scheme to build an opera house along the Amazon River in Werner Herzog’s surreal “Fitzcarraldo” (1982). She remained a fixture of European film in the decades that followed, and continued to collaborate with the continent’s top directors, including Liliana Cavani in “The Skin” (1981), which reunited her with Burt Lancaster; Marco Bellocchio in “Henry IV” (1984); Diane Kurys in “A Man in Love” (1987); and Henri Verneuil, who cast her as the matriarch of an Armenian family who emigrates to France after the genocide of 1915 in “Mayrig” (1991) and its sequel, “588 rue paradis” (1992).

During this period, she recounted her lengthy and storied career in a 1995 autobiography, Moi, Claudia, toi, Claudia, and she was feted by award organizations and festivals around the world, including an honorary Golden Lion from the 1993 Venice Film Festival. Cardinale also lent her fame to UNESCO as a goodwill ambassador for the defense of women’s rights beginning in 1999. In 2002, Cardinale received an honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival. Three years later, she published a second book, Mes Etoiles, which recounted more stories from her life in front of the camera. Far from being retired, Cardinale continued to star in three to four films a year, including a critically acclaimed turn as a Tunisian mother unable to come to terms with her French-educated son’s homosexuality in “Le fil” (“The String”) (2009). The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Today, little is written about Marta Toren but she had a fairly profilic Hollywood career. She was born in Stocholm in 1925. She began her career on the stage and then began making films in 1947. In 1949 she was in Hollywood and made “Illegal Entry” with Howard Duff, “Sword in the Desert” with Dana Andrews, “One Way Street” with James Mason, £Deported” with Jeff Chandler and “Sirocco” with Humphrey Bogart. By 1952 she was back in Sweden where she died in 1957 at the age of only 31. A page dedicated to Marta Toren on “Glamour Gils of the Silver Screen” can be accessed here.

IMDB Entry:

From an early age her dream was to become an actress. Her first application for acting studies at The Royal Dramatic Theater in 1944 was unsuccessful. After additional dramatic coaching she was finally accepted in 1947. But screenwriter Edwin Blumarranged a screen test for RKO which eventually led to her being offered a contract with Universal Studios. It was a hard choice but she accepted and left her studies after one semester. In Hollywood she quickly made 10 movies, including Sirocco (1951) withHumphrey Bogart. From 1952 she accepted movie offers from Italy with more demanding roles. She married director Leonardo Bercovici on June 13, 1952, and gave birth to a daughter. In early 1957, she went back to Sweden for her stage debut in a play by J.B. Priestley. She died one month later, at the age of 31, of a brain hemorrhage.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Mattias Thuresson

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 obituary.

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.

Ship 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)

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Artemis-9

This IMDB entry can also be accessed online here.

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.

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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.

Sissi, The Young Empress Sissi, Die junge Kaiserin Year: 1956 – Austria Romy Schneider, Karlheinz Bohm Director: Ernst Marischka Poster, France. It is forbidden to reproduce the photograph out of context of the promotion of the film. It must be credited to the Film Company and/or the photographer assigned by or authorized by/allowed on the set by the Film Company. Restricted to Editorial Use. Photo12 does not grant publicity rights of the persons represented.

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.

He made three notable U.S. films in 1962. He played Jakob Grimm in the 1962 MGM–Cinerama spectacular The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig van Beethoven in the Walt Disney film The Magnificent Rebel. (The latter film was made especially for the Disney anthology television series, but was released theatrically in Europe.) He appeared in a villainous role as the Nazi-sympathizing son of Paul Lukas in the MGM film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a Technicolor, widescreen remake of the 1921 silent Rudolph Valentino film.

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]

His Wikipedia entry can be accessed online here.

“Guardian” obituary:

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

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