Austrian actor Peter Simonischek dies at 76

Peter Simonischek, an eminent Austrian theater actor who found international fame as the shambolic prankster and adoring father in Maren Ade’s Oscar-nominated 2016 German film, “Toni Erdmann,” died May 29 at his home in Vienna. He was 76.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Brigitte Karner.

Simonischek was a member of the Burgtheater, the venerable Viennese institution otherwise known as the Burg, one of the oldest and largest ensemble theaters in the world.

“He was one of the last great stars of Austria,” said Simon Stone, an Australian director who is based in Vienna and cast Simonischek in his 2021 play, “Komplizen,” at the Burg. Simonischek, he said, was a beloved public figure, recognized by taxi drivers and passersby in the streets of Vienna, where he was more of a celebrity than most film stars.

He was certainly easy to spot: a handsome, shaggyhaired bear of a man who used his physical heft to marvelous effect.

His size “lent his performances a hulking grandeur,” said A. J. Goldmann, who covers German theater for The New York Times, “that could be tragic or give them a Falstaffian absurdity.”

In the comedy “Toni Erdmann,” a story of a workaholic management consultant named Ines ( played with brittle humor by Sandra Huller), Simonischek is Winifred, Ines’ mortifying father, a retired music teacher who sets out to liberate Ines from her soulsquashing profession by camouf laging himself as Toni Erdmann, a loutish, lumbering corporate consultant to her boss, and upending all she holds dear.

The film, written and directed by Ade, enthralled critics at Cannes and the New York Film Festival and was nominated for a 2016 Academy Award for best foreign language film ( losing to “The Salesman,” from Iran). A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, called it “a study in the radical power of embarrassment” and descr ibed Simonischek’s character as “a slapstick superhero.”