Horst Buchholz

Horst Buchholz was a famous German actor.

He was born on the 4th of December, 1933. He was always interested in theater. Due to this passion of his, he started getting involved in theatrical work even before he left school. His first stage performance was in 1949, at the age of 16. Soon, he shifted to West Berlin, where he earned a good name in the Schiller Theater.

Along with being a talented actor, he was a multilingual too. Owing to this skill of his, he dubbed many foreign films into the native language. Just two years after his appearance on stage, he started getting little roles in several films. He received a comparatively bigger role in the movie ‘Marianne’, in 1954. It had not even been a year when he acted in Himmel Ohne Sterne, for which he bagged the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film was Die Halbstarken, which describes the aggressive behavior of adolescents in the time after the Second World War got over. This movie brought him a lot of teen admirers.

Even though Die Halbstarken brought him a lot of attention, he achieved real stardom with Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, in 1957. He adapted the movie from Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull. Going ahead of German films, he started to act in British films too, with his first picture being Tiger Bay, alongside Hayley Mills. He followed this up with The Magnificent Seven Click to look into! >> Read More... , in 1960, ‘Fanny’ in 1961, and One, Two, Three of the same year. All of these motion pictures were Hollywood productions. After the success of these movies, he became quite popular among the American film audience and got offered many roles in prestigious productions subsequently. However, he turned down many role offers in movies, which went on to become immensely successful. Some of these were West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Fistful of Dollars.

Though he did some substantial work in the 1970s, the peak of his career was in the 1960s. Le Sauveur, a French drama film, was an exception. At the beginning of the 21st Century, just when the world had begun to accept homosexuality, he declared that he was of bisexual nature. His son, Christopher Buchholz, made a biographical film based on his father titled Horst Buchholz..Mein Papa, in 2005.

Pneumonia, he caught from a hip fracture operation, proved fatal for him. He died on the 3rd of March, 2003, at the age of 69. Taking his last breath in Berlin, the city he was very loyal to. He was buried there itself.