Actor klaus kinski biography

Klaus kinski - wikipedia

The German actor Klaus Kinski — was best known for his leading roles in the intense historical and fantasy films directed by Werner Herzog during the s and early s. In addition to being cast in Herzog's award-winning historical epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo , he took roles in several other films, but his career was hampered by his notoriously quixotic personality.

Klaus Kinski had a long and checkered career before his breakthrough to international prominence while working with German film director Werner Herzog. His art was born in the worst years of the 20th century as his family suffered during the Great Depression, and he spent the last part of World War II as a British prisoner of war.

A volatile figure, to say the least, Kinski remains difficult to evaluate because his accounts of his own life are likely exaggerated to a greater or lesser degree. Yet his compelling screen presence in his performances under Herzog, for instance in his role as an unhinged conquistador in Aguirre, the Wrath of God , was responsible for the status of those films as landmarks of German cinema.

When he was 16, Kinski joined the Wehrmacht , the German army, and he was deployed to the Netherlands in , when German positions there were crumbling. On his second day of combat, he was captured by British forces and placed in a prisoner-of-war camp in England. His memoirs, thought to be unreliable, tell of his desertion from the Germans and subsequent capture.

Kinski had his first experiences as an actor in this camp, appearing in plays staged by prisoners for the entertainment of their fellow internees. He was held by the British until when he returned to a Berlin that the war had left in ruins. In this unpromising atmosphere, Kinski began his acting career, taking small roles in plays and using the name Klaus Kinski.