Actor an internet sensation in his 60s
Bruno Ganz
actor b March 22, 1941 d February 15, 2019 B
runo Ganz, who has died aged 77, was an acclaimed, versatile actor who quietly won cinephile hearts over a career of almost 60 years.
He will be best recalled from two contrasting roles undertaken after he had reached lived-in middle age: displaying a touching stillness as Damiel, the melancholy angel descending from Berlin’s rooftops to live among mortals in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987), then a manic fervour as the terminally entrenched Hitler of
Downfall (2004).
Ganz’s watchmaker-like eye for character detail was much in evidence there, yet it was Hitler’s rants – extracted and resubtitled by wags – which proliferated online, resulting in a peculiar quirk of the early internet age: a sexagenarian who had spent decades honing his craft found himself reinvented overnight as a YouTube sensation.
These roles placed Ganz among cinema’s most eloquent German speakers, yet elsewhere his career was defined by a certain Swissness. Roaming Europe from a base in his birthplace of Zurich, he maintained an aura of thoughtful detachment.
The plot of The American Friend
(1977) – an earlier Wenders collaboration drawn from Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game – was reliant on the balding, 5ft 6in actor being so nondescript he might get away with murder.
He was born to an Italian mother and a Swiss mechanic father, and apparently baffled both with his decision to quit school to pursue acting. Spells as a bookseller and paramedic followed, but he soon found employment within the movie business, making his debut as a hotel page in 1960. After compiling a decade’s worth of minor stage and screen credits, he relocated to Berlin, forming the Left-wing theatre company Schaubuehne with writer-director Peter Stein in 1970. An early success came with the group’s epic 1971 staging of Peer Gynt.
It was Stein who boosted Ganz’s screen profile, directing him in an
H
adaptation of Gorky’s Summer
People (1976) that became a local hit. His international breakthrough came later that year in Eric Rohmer’s adaptation The Marquise of O, quickly followed by The American Friend, in which his meticulous, low-key approach made a fascinating contrast with Dennis Hopper’s strutting Ripley.
He became a pancontinental goto, spotted as the cloning expert briefing Nazi hunter Laurence Olivier in The Boys from Brazil (1978), then as Harker in Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu rethink, seducing Isabelle Huppert in Lady
of the Camellias (1981), and anchoring Alain Tanner’s Lisbonset curio In the White City (1983). e remained much in demand among German creatives, however, impressing as the Lebanon-bound journalist in Volker Schloendorff’s Circle of
Deceit (1981), before receiving stellar reviews for his Hamlet in Schaubuehne’s six-hour 1982 production.
Similar notices ensued for the era-spanning TV series Fathers and Sons: A German Tragedy (1986) before he donned Wings of Desire’s shabby mac and feathers. Reflecting on the role in 1994, he confessed it was an amazing experience: “In some way I became an angel, and who except me has experienced that in his lifetime?”
He missed out on the lead in Schindler’s List (1993) but won praise for his Antoine de SaintExupery in the BBC’s Saint-Ex
(1996) and was moving even when dubbed into Greek as the writer protagonist of Theo Angelopoulos’s Palme d’Or-winning Eternity and a
Day (1998).
American filmmakers began to take notice. Before playing Hitler, Ganz showed up in Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004); he followed Downfall with Francis Ford Coppola’s Romanian-shot folly Youth Without Youth (2007).
The work grew only more varied and surprising with age. Running the gamut of European history, he was a Holocaust survivor in The Reader (2008), then lent precision to making (cyanidelaced) tea as an ex-Stasi agent in the Liam Neeson runaround
Unknown (2011).
In 1996 he took delivery of the Iffland-Ring, a diamond-studded trinket passed to “the most significant and worthy actor in German-speaking theatre”, and which he held until his death. He received the European Film Academy’s Lifetime Achievement award and the German Order of Merit while serving as President of the German Film Academy between 2010 and 2015.
In 2018 he withdrew from the Salzburg production of The Magic Flute upon a diagnosis of colon cancer; his final screen appearance will be in Terrence Malick’s Second World War drama Radegund.
He is survived by Sabine, from whom he was separated, and by their son Daniel; his long-term partner was the photographer Ruth Walz.