Klaus Kinski

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While in Berechurch Hall, Kinski played his first roles on stage, taking part in variety shows intended to maintain morale among the prisoners. By May 1945, at the end of the war in Europe, the German POWs were anxious to return home. Kinski had heard that sick prisoners were to be returned first, and tried to qualify by standing outside naked at night, drinking urine and eating cigarettes. He remained healthy however, and was finally returned to Germany in 1946, after spending a year and four months in captivity.

Arriving in Berlin, he learned his father had died during the war, and his mother had been killed in an Allied air attack on the city.

After his return to Germany, Kinski started out as an actor, first at a small touring company in Offenburg, where he used his newly adopted name of Klaus Kinski. In 1946, he was hired by the renowned Schlosspark-Theater in Berlin. The next year, he was fired by the manager due to his unpredictable behavior. Other companies followed, but his unconventional and emotionally volatile behavior regularly got him into trouble.

For three months in 1955, Kinski lived in the same boarding house as a 13-year-old Werner Herzog, who would later direct him in a number of films. In the 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, Herzog described how Kinski locked himself in the communal bathroom for 48 hours and broke everything in the room to pieces.

In March 1956, he made a single guest appearance at Vienna's Burgtheater in Goethe's Torquato Tasso. Although respected by his colleagues, among them Judith Holzmeister, and cheered by the audience, Kinski did not gain a permanent contract. The Burgtheater's management became aware of the actor's earlier difficulties in Germany. He unsuccessfully tried to sue the company.

Living jobless in Vienna, Kinski reinvented himself as a monologist and spoken word artist. He presented the prose and verse of François Villon, William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, amongst others. He established himself as an actor touring Austria, Germany, and Switzerland with his shows.

Kinski's first film role was a small part in the 1948 film Morituri. He appeared in several German Edgar Wallace movies, and had bit parts in the American war films Decision Before Dawn (1951), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), and The Counterfeit Traitor (1962). In Alfred Vohrer's Die toten Augen von London (1961), his character refused any personal guilt for his evil deeds and claimed to have only followed the orders given to him. Kinski's performance reflected post-war Germany's reluctance to take responsibility for what had happened during World War II.

During the 1960s and 1970s, he appeared in various European exploitation film genres, as well as more acclaimed works such as Doctor Zhivago (1965), featured in a supporting role as an anarchist prisoner on his way to the Gulag.

He relocated to Italy during the late 1960s, and had roles in numerous Spaghetti Westerns, including For a Few Dollars More (1965), A Bullet for the General (1966), The Great Silence (1968), Twice A Judas (1969), and A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975). In 1977, he starred as the guerrillero Wilfried Böse in Operation Thunderbolt, based on the events of the 1976 Operation Entebbe.

Kinski's work with director Werner Herzog brought him international recognition. They made five films together: Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1978), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987). Despite their collaborations, Herzog had threatened, on occasion, to murder Kinski. In one incident, Kinski was said to have been saved by his dog who attacked Herzog as he crept up to supposedly burn down the actor's house. Herzog has refused to comment on his numerous other plans to kill Kinski. However, he did pull a gun on Kinski, or at least threatened to do so, on the set of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, after the actor threatened to walk off the set.

In 1980, Kinski refused the lead villain role of Major Arnold Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark, telling director Steven Spielberg, "This script is a yawn-making, boring pile of shit" and "moronically shitty". Kinski would go on to play Kurtz, an Israeli intelligence officer, in The Little Drummer Girl, a feature film by George Roy Hill in 1984. It also starred Diane Keaton as Charlie.

Kinski co-starred as an evil killer from the future in a 1987 Sci-Fi based TV film Timestalkers with William Devane and Lauren Hutton. His last film (which he wrote and directed) was Kinski Paganini (1989), in which he played the legendary violinist Niccolò Paganini.

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