Bruno Ganz, whose sterling work on screen immortalised him in the annals of acting history thanks to films such as Wings Of Desire and Downfall has died. He was 77.
Born in Zurich in 1941, Ganz was the son of a Swiss mechanic and his Italian wife. Deciding early that acting was to be his career, he skipped college and began appearing on stage in the 1960s. In 1970, he went on to found his own theatre company, Schaubühne. His theatre career included playing Hamlet and the title role if Faust as part of a Goethe marathon in 2001.
The 1960s also saw him kick off a consistent stream of work on film, with a small role in Swiss comedy The Man In The Black Derby. Other memorable movies included The American Friend, Nosferatu The Vampire, Bread And Tulips, The Manchurian Candidate, The Baader Meinhof Complex and a brief role in The Counselor. Two roles stood out from the rest, with his turn as a guardian angel who tires of the heavenly duty and falls for a mortal in Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire and as the ill, near-defeat, enraged Adolph Hitler in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, AKA the performance that launched a thousand memes. In 1996, he received a high honour in the shape of the Iffland-Ring, a diamond-studded piece of jewelry named for an 18th-century German actor and given to the "most significant and most worthy actor of the German-speaking theatre." When he received it in 1996, as a bequest from his predecessor, Josef Meinrad, he was only the fifth actor to have held it since the 1870s.
Ganz died on Friday following a diagnosis of colon cancer last summer, and remained working consistently up until last year. He's survived by his partner, photographer Ruth Walz, and son Daniel.
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