Celebrity Birthday of the Day – October 18

Hoo boy. How to sum up the career of Klaus Kinski? Here’s a guy who looked just as insane as he supposedly was, and the result is that he made some bizarre but truly memorable movies. Kinski began his acting career following his return to Germany after WW2, and with no professional theatrical training, he joined a small touring company in Offenburg. His erratic behaviour was notorious, and in 1950 Kinski wound up in a psychiatric hospital for three days. He tried twice to commit suicide in 1955 due to his failure to secure film roles, but in the 1960s he began to gain more acclaim, and played roles in films such as Doctor Zhivago, For a Few Dollars More, and The Great Silence. In the 1970s he began a long-standing partnership with director Werner Herzog, and the two of them worked on five films together: Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. Kinski’s final film was the 1989 semi-bio-pic Kinski Paganini, in which Kinski claimed to have lived through the same experiences as the famous violinist Niccolo Paganini, who was also notoriously tempestuous. Klaus Kinski died of a heart attack on November 23, 1991. He was 65.

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