Engel, Wolfgang

(1943- )

   Director, actor. Engel's theatrical career began in 1962 as a stagehand in the German Democratic Republic. In 1965 he passed the regime's standardized test for actors and began working in Schwerin as both an actor and an assistant director. In 1974 he was named director of the Saxony-Radebeul Regional Theaters. Through the 1980s he worked steadily as an actor and resident director at the Dresden State Theater, where his production of Friedrich Hebbel's Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs) won national attention and toured to Munich, Zurich, and Vienna. That production also won him a valuable contract to begin directing in West Germany, at the State Theater of the Saarland. He began working extensively in the West after the collapse of the GDR, but he returned to what was formerly East Germany in 1995 when he was named director of the Leipzig City Theater.