Martin Kosleck

Martin Kosleck, born Nicolaie Yoshkin on March 24, 1904, in Barkotzen, Pomerania, Germany, was an actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television across more than four decades. The son of a forester, Kosleck came from a German-Russian family and developed an interest in acting early in life. He trained for six years at the Max Reinhardt Dramatic School, where he distinguished himself in Shakespearean roles, and also worked in revues and musicals in Berlin.

His film career began at age 23 with a silent picture directed by Johannes Brandt, Der Fahnenträger von Sedan. He subsequently appeared in Lupu Pick's Napoleon at Saint Helena and, in 1930, in two additional German productions: the science-fiction sound film Alraune and The Singing City. As Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in the early 1930s, Kosleck spoke out against them publicly, which earned him a place on the Gestapo's list of undesirables. He left Germany in 1931, first relocating to Britain before arriving in New York City in 1932 and continuing on to Hollywood.

His first American film appearance came in Fashions of 1934, starring Bette Davis. Finding limited work in Hollywood, he returned to New York and the stage, where he acted in a Broadway production of The Merchant of Venice. It was during this run that director Anatole Litvak recruited him for a role in the 1939 Warner Bros. film Confessions of a Nazi Spy, starring Edward G. Robinson, Francis Lederer, Paul Lukas, and George Sanders. In that film, Kosleck played Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, a role he would reprise four additional times throughout his career, most notably in Paramount's 1944 pseudo-documentary The Hitler Gang.

His personal antipathy toward the Nazi regime fueled his willingness to be typecast in roles that many of his German émigré contemporaries resented. Throughout the early 1940s he appeared in a succession of anti-Nazi films, including Nurse Edith Cavell, Espionage Agent, Underground, Berlin Correspondent, Bomber's Moon, and Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas. As the war ended and demand for such roles diminished, Kosleck transitioned into horror B-pictures, appearing in The Frozen Ghost, The Mummy's Curse, She-Wolf of London starring June Lockhart, and House of Horrors, in which he played Marcel De Lange, an insane sculptor who uses a monster to exact revenge on his critics.

Kosleck returned to New York following the decline of his film opportunities and appeared on Broadway in The Madwoman of Chaillot between 1948 and 1950. He also became a prolific television performer, with credits including Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Motorola Television Hour, Studio One, Thriller, The Rifleman, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Outer Limits, Get Smart, Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The F.B.I., The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, It Takes a Thief, and Sanford and Son. In 1970, he appeared in the Hogan's Heroes episode "The Gestapo Takeover," playing General Mueller. A heart attack in the 1970s curtailed his output, though he continued to work occasionally in television productions including Love, American Style and Banacek. His final film appearance came in 1980 in The Man with Bogart's Face.

Beyond acting, Kosleck was a practiced painter who worked as a portrait artist between film roles to support himself. Working in an impressionist style, he painted portraits of both Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich. In his personal life, he was in a relationship with fellow German émigré actor Hans Heinrich von Twardowski from the early 1930s until Twardowski's death in 1958. In 1947, Kosleck married German actress Eleonora von Mendelssohn, who died by suicide in 1951. Kosleck died on January 15, 1994, at the age of 89, following abdominal surgery, at a convalescent home in Santa Monica.