Kinski, Klaus

(Nikolaus Nakzynski, 1926-1991)

   Actor. Kinski's became a recognizable cinematic countenance comparable to Peter Lorre's of a generation earlier. He began his career as a theater actor with no training (as Lorre had done), appearing in Tübingen and later Baden-Baden. There Boleslaw Barlog hired him to work in Berlin, beginning in 1946. In Berlin he established himself at both the Schlosspark Theater and the Deutsches Theater, and by 1950 Kin-ski had caught the attention of Fritz Kortner, who hired him for a production of Don Carlos in 1950 at the Munich Kammerspiele. Kinski in fact resembled a young Kortner, and like Kortner in his 20s, Kinski's acting style was often frenetic and untraditional. Kinski began to concentrate on film acting by the mid-1950s and subsequently appeared in more than 100 films, the vast majority of which failed to exploit his enormous talent. Few good actors have made more bad movies than did Kinski. The exceptions were usually those by Werner Herzog (though Kinski appeared briefly in Dr. Zhivago under David Lean's direction). For Herzog, Kinski played a series of profoundly "conflicted" characters, beginning in Aguirre, derZorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 1972), Nosferatu (1979), Woyzeck (1979), and concluding with Fitzcarraldo (1982).