Sander, Otto

(1941- )

   Actor. Sander is, along with Georg Kaiser, one of the few personalities in the German theater to have worked as a merchant seaman before beginning an active artistic career. After completing studies at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich, Sander began working professionally in 1965 in Düsseldorf for two years, then in Heidelberg, then Berlin. In the early 1970s he joined the Schaubühne company there, working with Klaus-Michael Grüber, Claus Peymann, Luc Bondy, Peter Stein, and Robert Wilson. With Stein he did several productions, though many regarded his work in Summer Folk as being among the best performances of the 1970s. With Wilson in 1979, he got good notices as the Comedian in Death, Destruction, and Detroit, which led to outstanding film work that established him internationally. He was particularly effective in leading roles for Völker Schlöndorff's Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1979), as the submarine captain in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), as the toothsome Marxist Karl Liebknecht in Margarete von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg(1986), in Wim Wenders's Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), and In weiter Ferne so nah! (Far Away, So Close!, 1993). Sander continued working in Schaubühne productions in the 1980s, though not as a regular member of the company. His work in that decade included performances in Bondy's production of Botho Strauss's Kalldewey Farce (1982), Stein's much-heralded production of Anton Chekhov's The Three Sisters (1984), and Grüber's Amphytrion by Heinrich von Kleist.

   Sander is also a gifted comedian, singer, and voiceover artist; his manic performance in the cult classic Kondom des Grauens (The Condom of Cruelty, also titled Killer Condom, 1996) is a good example of his comic gifts, while his narration for Aus Liebe zu Deutschland (For the Love of Germany, 2003), the German television miniseries Das Jahrhundert des Theaters (The Theater's Century, 2002), and the German version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) put his resonant baritone on full aural display. His performance in the 1994 Berlin staging of Ralph Benatzky's musical version of Oskar Blumenthal's Im weiss'n Rossi(The White Horse Inn) was a masterpiece of comic understatement.