Otto Mellies

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Otto Ewald Ernst Mellies (born January 19, 1931 in Schlawe , Pomerania ; † April 26, 2020 in Zeuthen ) was a German actor , radio play speaker and voice actor .

Life

Otto Mellies was born in Schlawe in January 1931. In 1938 the family moved to Stolp . His older brother was Eberhard Mellies (1929-2019), who was also an actor and voice actor. After the Red Army marched in in March 1945, his mother, sister and their children committed suicide. Mellies only survived by chance and came to Schwerin after 1945 via Wismar and Freistatt . During this time he and his brother worked, among other things, as a groom for soldiers of the Red Army .

Since 1952 Mellies was married to the soprano Luise Bergner, who died in 2015. The couple had a daughter and a son.

Otto Mellies, who had lived in his house in Berlin-Bohnsdorf since the 1960s , died on April 26, 2020 at the age of 89. He last lived in a retirement home in Zeuthen .

Career

Mellies passed the entrance exam at the State Drama School in Schwerin in the summer of 1947 at the age of 16 , attended it from 1947 to 1949 and was there a. a. Trained by Lucie Höflich . For the beginning of the season in 1949 he got his first contract for the Mecklenburg State Theater in Schwerin . His first stage role was that of the student in Goethe's Faust . He then played in Neustrelitz , from 1950 in Stralsund , later again in Schwerin and from 1953 to 1955 at the Rostock Volkstheater . Mellies was later still engaged in Erfurt . In Stralsund, Mellies first appeared in Lessing's Nathan the Wise in 1951 in the role of Templar at the Stralsund Theater .

In 1956 Wolfgang Langhoff brought him to the Deutsches Theater Berlin . He was a member of the ensemble of this house for 50 years. He has appeared in Ibsen's Peer Gynt , Sartre's Die Flies and Strindberg's Die Gespenstersonata, among others. He played repeatedly under the direction of Jürgen Gosch and Thomas Langhoff . From 1987 he appeared there a total of 325 times within eighteen years as Nathan the Wise in the production by Friedo Solter , in which Dieter Mann and Christine Schorn also took part.

Since 1955 Mellies also worked as a film actor. He made his film debut in a smaller role as Werner Blume in the comedy Sommerliebe based on Gerhard Hardel's story Eine kleine Sommerferienliebe . In 1960 he was awarded the Heinrich Greif Prize, First Class, for his role as young Ferdinand in Martin Hellberg's Schiller film adaptation Kabale und Liebe (1959) . Shortly thereafter, Hellberg also cast him in his version of Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm or The Soldier's Gluck (1962), where he was Major von Tellheim alongside Marita Böhme . In 1965 he played in the television series Dr. Schlüter took the title role of career-obsessed chemist Dr. Martin Schlueter. In the two-part Secret Command Spree (1968) and the three-part sequel Geheime Spur (1969) he took on the role of Lieutenant Bernd Rolland. Mellies was seen in three different roles as Alfons Persicke, Kai-Olaf and Bruno Meyer in the television show Three Lovely Sisters: A Man for Life (1985).

After the reunification in the GDR , Mellies continued to be cast in film and television productions. In 1995 he shot for the Sat.1 production Natascha - Wettlauf mit dem Tod (1996), directed by Bernd Böhlich , where he - based on the doctor Ryke Geerd Hamer - the Dr. Glowalla embodied, who is arrested in front of the hospital when he helps the desperate parents of Natascha, who is suffering from cancer, to flee from the orthodox doctors he hated. In Johannes Grieser's psychological thriller Murder in the Best Family (2011) he played the rich sawmill owner Reinhard Lorenz, who invited his quarreling daughters Katrin ( Katharina Böhm ) and Manuela ( Maja Maranow ) to his 80th birthday. In 2012, he was awarded the German Film Prize for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Andreas Dresen's family drama Halt on the open air as the father of his son Frank ( Milan Peschel ) who discovered an unoperable brain tumor . Kilian Riedhof cast him as a pensioner Rudolf at the side of Dieter Hallervorden in his movie His last race (2013). In Roland Suso Richter's film drama The Spiegel Affair (2014), Konrad Adenauer played the role of the first German Chancellor. From 1996 to 2019 he was seen a total of six times in the television crime series Tatort . In the episode Life after the Death of the Rubin and Karow investigative team, which first aired in November 2019 , he played an old, embittered former judge from the GDR who now, decades later, is practicing supposed justice.

From 2015 to 2019 he moderated the show Farewell is a Quiet Word of the MDR as the successor to Hans Teuscher , after replacing Teuscher as moderator in 2013.

Mellies recorded numerous radio plays and audio books until the very end. He also worked as a voice actor. After the death of Gert Günther Hoffmann , he became the standard voice of Paul Newman . He also lent his voice to actors such as Christopher Lee , Michael Gambon , Maximilian Schell , Omero Antonutti , Pierre Vaneck , James Cromwell and Raf Vallone .

theatre

German theater

Filmography (selection)

Movie and TV

Voice actor

Albert Finney

Brian Cox

Christopher Lee

Donald Sutherland

Frank Langella

Hal Holbrook

Helmut Bakaitis

James Coburn

James Cromwell

James Karen

John Forsythe

Michael Gambon

Michael Lonsdale

Paul Newman

Philip Baker Hall

Ron Rifkin

Tom Wilkinson

William Shatner

Movies

Series

Radio plays (selection)

Audiobooks (selection)

  • 1977: Jacob Grimm / Wilhelm Grimm : Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm - The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats (Narrator) - Director: Heiner Möbius (Children's radio play - Litera )
  • 1977: Jacob Grimm / Wilhelm Grimm: Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm - Sleeping Beauty (narrator) - Director: Heiner Möbius (children's radio play - Litera)
  • 1996: Wolf Durian : Kai aus der Kiste , Patmos audio / Sauerländer audio (awarded the hr2 audio book best list)
  • 2000: Hans Christian Andersen : Die Schneekönigin , Patmos audio / Sauerländer audio
  • 2001: Edzard Schaper : The legend of the fourth king , Patmos Verlag / Sauerländer audio (awarded as CD / MC of the month IfaK)
  • 2002: Rabindranath Tagore : On the Banks of Silence , Patmos audio
  • 2002: Jorge Amado : The Striped Kater and the Swallow Sinhá , Patmos audio / Sauerländer audio (awarded the hr2 audio book best list and as CD / MC of the month IfaK)
  • 2003: The Germans ' Favorite Poems , Patmos audio
  • 2004: Silvino Alves da Silva Neto : The Hermit , Patmos audio
  • 2004: The most beautiful German ballads , Patmos audio (awarded the hr2 audio book best list)
  • 2005: Where the Black Rivers Flow - Scary Stories , Patmos audio
  • 2005: Rabindranath Tagore : The Golden Boat , Patmos audio
  • 2005: The great Christmas audio book, Patmos audio
  • 2006: Theodor Fontane : Der Stechlin , Patmos audio
  • 2006: Prayers of the Poets , Patmos audio
  • 2006: Kissing the Muses , Patmos audio
  • 2006: Old Prague, Goldmund audio books
  • 2007: Alfred Döblin : Berlin Alexanderplatz , Patmos audio
  • 2014: Luis Sepúlveda : How the cat and the mouse became friends anyway , Sauerländer audio (awarded the hr2 audio book best list)
  • 2016: Marilynne Robinson : Gilead , Argon Verlag
  • 2017: Andrea Schomburg / Dorothee Mahnkopf: Professor Murke's top secret lexicon of extinct animals that never existed , Sauerländer audio
  • 2019: Brigitte Weninger (Ed.): Engel, Hase, Bommelmütze - 24 Advent stories , Sauerländer audio

literature

Awards

  • 1966: National Prize of the GDR, 2nd class for art and literature (as a collective)
  • 1987: National Prize of the GDR, 2nd class for art and literature
  • 2012: German Film Award for the best male supporting role in Halt on open track
  • 2017: Nomination for the German Audio Book Prize (Best Artist category) for the reading by Gilead (Argon Verlag)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Great theater actor: Otto Mellies is dead. In: Der Spiegel . Retrieved April 28, 2020 .
  2. ^ "On the death of Otto Mellies: Mourning in Zeuthen" , maz-online.de, May 1, 2020, accessed on May 12, 2020
  3. ↑ Otto Mellies: On a beautiful summer morning ... Verlag Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-360-01997-4 ( limited preview in the Google book search [accessed on April 28, 2020]).
  4. ↑ a b c Otto Mellie's biography at defa-stiftung.de ; accessed on April 28, 2020.
  5. ↑ Part 36 of the BZ series about the districts of the capital. Today: Grünau, Bohnsdorf, Alt-Glienicke. Here you live quietly like in the country, which is almost too sleepy for some. Online edition of the BZ from November 18, 2008.
  6. ↑ "MZ conversation from 2017 Otto Mellies talks about his life - success and tragedy" , mz-web.de, December 23, 2017, accessed on May 12, 2020
  7. ↑ Three Lovely Sisters: A Man for Life film datasheet at Das Erste . Retrieved January 18, 2015.
  8. ↑ Natascha - Race with Death (Mellies, picture no. 3). In: Sat.1 Gold . Retrieved April 28, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Farewell is a quiet word on fernsehserien.de; accessed on January 20, 2017.
  10. ↑ GERMAN THEATER I am Oedipus, who is more? Berliner Zeitung , October 16, 2003, accessed on January 5, 2011 .
  11. ↑ We were still missing that. Neues Deutschland , June 24, 1994, accessed January 5, 2011 .
  12. ↑ The red rooster. Felix Bloch Erben , accessed January 5, 2011 .
  13. ^ "The Forest" by Alexander N. Ostrowski at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Neues Deutschland , December 28, 1992, accessed January 5, 2011 .
  14. ↑ Kai-Uwe Kohlschmidt: It's just me. Keyßer in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Land - script. In: DeutschlandfunkKultur.de. February 23, 2018, accessed July 24, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Mellies, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mellies, Otto Ewald Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor, radio play speaker and voice actor
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Schlawe near Stettin, Pomerania
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 2020
Place of death Zeuthen