BRUNO GANZ

(22 March 1941 - 16 February 2019)

The Swiss-born actor Bruno Ganz, who has died aged 77 from cancer, was recognized as one of the best actors working in the German language on stage, in cinema and on television. His main love was for the theatre and with Peter Stein he founded the Schaubṻhne ensemble in Berlin in 1970. He worked in cinema from 1960 but was not a great success until Summer Guests in 1976, but then he went on to work with directors of the New German Cinema, such as Werner Herzog, Volker Schlṏndorff and Wim Wenders, as well as Eric Rohmer, Francis Ford Coppola, Franklin J. Schaffner, Ridley Scott, David Hare and Stephen Daldry, among many others. Jeanne Moreau directed him in Lumiere in 1976 and he was in Rohmer’s The Marquise of O... in the same year. Wenders cast him in The American Friend, and he was also in Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman and The Absence, Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil, Herzog’s Nosferatu (as Jonathan Harker), Mauro Bolognini’s The Lady of the Camellias, Schlṏndorff’s Circle of Deceit and Wenders’ Wings of Desire, one of the few films for which UK audiences will remember him in particular. He was also in the sequel Faraway, So Close!

The other outstanding performance given by Ganz was as Adolf Hitler in the Oscar-nominated Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s portrayal of the Chancellor’s last days towards the end of World War II. Ganz, more than any other actor attempting the part (Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Frank Finlay, et al), captured the maniacal hysteria of the man that was totally believable. In a film career that encompassed nearly sixty years and over 120 performances in cinema and TV alone, Ganz as Hitler will outlive all his other work. Among the many other films he made were Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor, David Hare’s Strapless, Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, Daldry’s The Reader, Atom Egoyan’s Remember and Unknown, the action thriller with Liam Neeson.

More recently he was in Sally Potter’s The Party and Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built (2018). In the same year he also he appeared as Sigmund Freud in The Tobacconist, I, Witness and Terrence Malick’s Radegund, which is still in post-production. Among the awards he accumulated were the Austrian Iffland-Ring, a diamond ring given to an actor deemed to be the best in the German-speaking theatre, an award that is kept until the recipient dies; the German Order of Merit and the French Lêgion d’honneur. He also won many individual awards for his stage and film work. Bruno Ganz married his wife Sabine in 1965 and, although they later separated, they remained married until his death. They have one son, Daniel.

MICHAEL DARVELL