Horst Buchholz

Horst Werner Buchholz was a German actor born in Berlin on 4 December 1933, who built a career spanning more than 60 feature films between 1951 and 2002. He also appeared on Broadway between 1959 and 1963. Buchholz died on 3 March 2003 in Berlin at the age of 69, following pneumonia that developed after surgery for a hip fracture. He was buried at the Friedhof Heerstraße in Berlin.

Buchholz was the son of Maria Hasenkamp and never knew his biological father. His mother married a shoemaker named Hugo Buchholz in 1938, whose surname Horst adopted. A half-sister, Heidi, was born in 1941 and gave him the nickname Hotte, which stayed with him throughout his life. During World War II he was evacuated to Silesia and ended the war in a foster home in Czechoslovakia before returning to Berlin. He left his childhood home in East Berlin to pursue work in West Berlin, establishing himself at institutions including the Schiller Theater and in radio. He first appeared on stage in 1949, having barely completed his schooling.

His early film work began with foreign-language voice dubbing, including Lampwick in Pinocchio and Ben Cooper in Johnny Guitar, before he transitioned to small on-screen parts starting in 1951 with films such as Warum and Adventure in Berlin. Larger roles followed, including Marianne of My Youth in 1954, directed by Julien Duvivier, and Sky Without Stars in 1955. The 1956 film Die Halbstarken made him a teen favorite in Germany; its American release, titled Teenage Wolfpack, billed him as Henry Bookholt and marketed him as a new James Dean, a comparison that followed him during his youth. Full stardom came with Confessions of Felix Krull in 1957, directed by Kurt Hoffmann and based on the Thomas Mann novel, in which Buchholz played the lead role of a narcissistic high-class conman. That same year he appeared alongside Romy Schneider in both The Girl and the Legend and Monpti.

Buchholz entered English-language filmmaking in 1959 with the British production Tiger Bay, which introduced Hayley Mills to audiences and was a notable success. He then accepted a Hollywood offer to play the young gunslinger Chico in The Magnificent Seven in 1960, a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai in which his role corresponded to the one originally played by Toshiro Mifune. While in the United States ahead of that production, he appeared on Broadway in Chéri in 1959, a short-lived adaptation. The Magnificent Seven went on to become a classic of the genre. Buchholz followed it with the romantic drama Fanny in 1961, featuring Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier, and Billy Wilder's Berlin-set comedy One, Two, Three in 1961, starring James Cagney. Scheduling conflicts prevented him from taking offered roles as Tony in West Side Story and Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia, the latter part ultimately going to Omar Sharif. He subsequently appeared in Nine Hours to Rama in 1963 for Twentieth Century Fox and The Empty Canvas in 1963, shot in Italy with Bette Davis. That same year he returned to Broadway for a short run in Andorra.

Later in his career Buchholz moved increasingly into supporting roles in both film and television, appearing in productions including Raid on Entebbe in 1976 and Berlin Tunnel 21 in 1981, and guest starring on American television series such as Logan's Run, Fantasy Island, Charlie's Angels, and How the West Was Won. He voiced Fa Zhou in the German-language dub of the animated film Mulan and portrayed Dr. Lessing in Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful in 1997, one of his most internationally recognized later performances.

In 1958, Buchholz married French actress Myriam Bru. The couple had two children: a son, Christopher, who became an actor, and a daughter, Beatrice. In a 2000 interview Buchholz described an arrangement in which Myriam's life was centered in Paris while his remained in Berlin, and he also discussed his bisexuality in that interview. His son Christopher later produced a feature-length documentary, Horst Buchholz ... Mein Papa, released in 2005, which explored his father's sexuality as part of a broader examination of his life.