Karl Heinz Willschrei
Karl Heinz "Axel" Willschrei (* 18th March 1939 in Homberg , † 25. May 2003 in Altea in Alicante , Spain ) was a German screenwriter and producer in television , a specialist in crime series.
Live and act
Willschrei became a half-orphan in 1942 and his father died in the war. He grew up with his mother in a working-class district of Essen . After graduating from high school, he studied theater studies , German , philosophy and newspaper studies in Munich and Vienna . In 1965 he received his doctorate with a thesis on " The poetic genres and their relationship to the stage ". During his studies Willschrei gained his first experience as a journalist as a trainee at the Neue Ruhr Zeitung and also worked as an assistant director at a Viennese cellar theater. Willschrei began his media career at Bavaria Film , where he was head of department for international co-productions from 1970 to 1973.
Willschrei has been writing screenplays for television since 1965, often in collaboration with Georg Althammer from the start , and quickly specialized in the crime genre. As a freelance writer, he went into business for himself in 1974 and founded the company teamfilm in order to “have more influence on the cinematic implementation of his material”. In 1976, together with Althammer, he founded the Monaco Film production company, which in the following years expanded into the Monaco Group and became one of the leading television crime thriller producers.
As a screenwriter, wrote Willschrei miniseries or series like Alexander Zwo, hardness 10 , Lobster and numerous crime scene - movies, including the classic duel and red - red - dead and a number of individual productions. He was also an author on the ARD early evening series Graf Yoster gives himself the honor and The strange methods of Franz Josef Wanninger involved. He later worked for the ZDF crime series Ein Fall für Zwei and Der Alte and was responsible for the SAT.1 series Wolffs Revier (also as a producer). For the latter station, he also created the series AS and Ein Mord für Quandt .
He received the Bavarian TV Prize for the 1993 episode Poker from the Wolffs Revier series . Together with Jürgen Heinrich , Klaus Pönitz and Gerd Wameling, he received the Adolf Grimme Bronze Prize in 1993 for the entire series .
Several of the individual TV productions and multi-part series that he wrote or produced, including three works by Ilse Hofmann in the 1980s, were adventure stories and played in exotic locations. Willschrei has written nearly 150 screenplays in his almost 35-year television career.
Karl Heinz Willschrei was married three times: First he married his college friend Christine Witsch. His second marriage was to actress Angelika Bender . His third marriage was with Hildegard Zimmermann, with whom he lived from 1988 until his death.
Filmography
on television as a screenwriter
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Individual evidence
literature
- Egon Netenjakob: TV Lexicon. Directors, authors, dramaturges 1952–1992. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1994, p. 436 ff.
Web links
- Karl Heinz Willschrei in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Biography in the lexicon of German crime writers
- Obituary in the mirror
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Willschrei, Karl Heinz |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Willschrei, Axel (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German screenwriter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 18, 1939 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Homberg on the Lower Rhine |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 25, 2003 |
| Place of death | Altea near Alicante , Spain |