Horst Buchholz, the darkly handsome German actor who played a variety of roles in international cinema for nearly fifty years, died in Berlin of pneumonia on March 3. He was 69.

Born December 4, 1933, in Berlin's working-class Prenzlauer Berg district to the son of a shoemaker, Horst's father was killed when he was only nine and he was moved to a dispatch home in Schlesien, a countryside where Nazi officials sent children to protect them during the Allied bombing raids on Berlin.

He was forced to provide for himself after the war and eventually found theater work. He made his stage debut when he was just 14 in a Berlin theater version of the Erich Kaestner's children's classic Emil and the Detectives. He left school at 16 to take theatre classes and began to make a comfortable living finding stage work in Berlin. His lean good looks, and edgy persona attracted attention very quickly, and he managed to get his first substantial role film when he was cast in Helmut Kautner's romantic Sky Without Stars (1955). He made a few more films before hitting the jackpot as a scheming Parisian hotel employee in Kurt Hoffman's Confessions of Felix Krull (1957). The film won the Golden Globe for best foreign picture and raised Horst's stock as a bankable leading man considerably.

He soon found film work and budding stardom outside of Germany: as a fugitive sailor who befriends a young Hayley Mills in J. Lee Thompson's excellent crime drama Tiger Bay (1959); as Chico, a cocky young gunslinger in John Sturges' international hit The Magnificent Seven (1960) co-starring Steve McQueen and James Coburn; and as a young communist in Billy Wilder's superb satire regarding the construction of the Berlin Wall One, Two, Three (1961) co-starring James Cagney and Pamela Tiffin.

Sadly, the quality of his films throughout the years never quite matched the level of his earlier successes, but he still found a few interesting roles: Marco Polo in Noel Howard's action adventure Marco the Magnificent (1965); Johann Strauss, Jr., in Andrew Stone's The Great Waltz (1972); and a neat stint in Dan Curtis's underrated horror anthology Dead of Night (1977). The roles continued to diminish in quality, but with his fluency in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Russian (in addition to his native German), he always found some work in numerous independent foreign films, and was in great demand for voice-overs and dub assignments for English language films when they were distributed overseas.

In recent years, Horst had two bright moments in his spotty career: portraying an earthly angel in Wim Wenders' Far Away, So Close (1993); and playing the elderly, cultivated physician Dr. Lessing, a German who develops a friendship with a Jewish waiter during World Ward II in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful (1997). He is survived by his wife, the actress Myriam Bru, and two children.

by Michael T. Toole