Film star Horst Buchholz dies

Horst Buchholz, a German actor whose film credits included The Magnificent Seven and Life is Beautiful, died today in Berlin. He was 69.

Dubbed the James Dean of German films for rebellious teens he played in the late 1950s, Buchholz moved to United States and scored his first Hollywood hit with the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven, starring with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn and other action stars.

The next year, director Billy Wilder cast him alongside James Cagney in the Cold War satire One, Two, Three.

Set around the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall, the biting comedy features Cagney as a Coca-Cola executive who finds that the daughter of his boss has fallen in love with and secretly married a young communist, played by Buchholz, while in Berlin.

Buchholz branched out, also making films in Britain, Spain, Italy and France. He played a Nazi concentration camp doctor in Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning 1997 film Life is Beautiful.

Born on December 4, 1933, in Berlin’s working-class Prenzlauer Berg district, the shoemaker’s son survived the Second World War in the countryside where Nazi officials sent children to protect them from Allied bombing raids on the capital.

In the tough postwar years, Buchholz landed his first stage role at 15 in a Berlin theatre version of the German children’s classic Emil and the Detectives.

He dropped out of high school in 1950, took acting lessons and worked towards his film career with roles in Berlin theatres over the next five years. His Broadway debut came in 1959 in Cherie.

Buchholz died of pneumonia at the Charite hospital, spokeswoman Kerstin Ullrich said. He is survived by his wife, the former actress Myriam Bru, and two children.