Ulrich Wildgruber

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Ulrich Wildgruber in the radio play studio in a recording by the Berlin photographer Werner Bethsold . (1986)

Ulrich Wildgruber (born November 18, 1937 in Bielefeld , † November 30, 1999 on Sylt ) was a German actor .

Life

The son of a Bielefeld master bookbinder had been inspired by becoming an actor since he was at school and when he worked at an amateur theater . At first he began his acting training in several stations with private acting teachers, which was interrupted again and again, and he had to get through life with numerous jobs, but without losing sight of his goal. It was not until 1960 that he succeeded in being accepted for an acting course at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna , which he left because of controversy. He made his debut in 1963 at the Vienna Volkstheater in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children under the direction of Gustav Manker as Schweizererkas in a performance that broke the Brecht boycott in Austria .

Until 1972, when its up-ending his death collaboration with director Peter Zadek began Ulrich Wild Gruber was at theaters in Basel , Heidelberg , Oberhausen and Stuttgart hired in 1971 for a short time and at the Berlin Schaubühne of Peter Stein .

Ulrich Wildgruber (1985)

He made his breakthrough at the Schauspielhaus Bochum under Peter Zadek in 1972. Here he grew up to be the protagonist of Zadek's productions and played all of the major Shakespeare roles with him, with the corpulent actor often being cast against the usual type of role, which also led to theater scandals. His idiosyncratic diction and speech melodies also repeatedly prompted criticism. For Zadek, however, it was the ideal resonance body for his theatrical spectacles, as Wildgruber's way of playing could be as powerful as it was tender.

Ulrich Wildgruber (right), playing with the later world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1985 in Hamburg.

After Zadek's directorship in Bochum ended in 1975, Wildgruber moved to the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and stayed there until 1991. His last role was Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet , directed by Peter Zadek for the Vienna Festival in 1999. After guest appearances in Zurich and Strasbourg , Ulrich played Wildgruber played this role again at the Berlin Schaubühne. 35 performances in October and November 1999 were sold out.

In the last years of his life, Wildgruber suffered from a heart disease that aroused in him the fear that he would no longer be able to pursue a stage activity. On November 29, 1999, Wildgruber drove from Berlin to Sylt, where he had had his vacation home for years. On the night of November 30th, he drowned himself in the North Sea. The next day, walkers found him dead on the beach. An autopsy showed that Wildgruber had neither been drunk nor anesthetized at the time of death and thus deliberately - as a non-swimmer - went into the water. His grave is in the Brackwede cemetery in his hometown of Bielefeld.

When asked whether it was particularly difficult for an actor to get older, Ulrich Wildgruber replied in an interview in 1994: “A Stradivarius might get better over the years. But when you have a body that is getting fatter and fatter, that cannot flip, - I can no longer express many things, even if I want to. If I had known, I would never have become an actor. I was actually too lazy to learn artistry, so I never really did my job. I just like how my imagination moves. "

From 1975 to the late 1980s he lived with his wife Vera Wildgruber (dramaturge) and a daughter in Hamburg, and from 1991 until his death in Berlin with his colleague Martina Gedeck .

Since 2000, the Ulrich Wildgruber Prize has been awarded as a theater prize to promote young actors in his memory .

Honors

theatre

Filmography

Film about Ulrich Wildgruber

  • 2000: Playing for life - the actor Ulrich Wildgruber. Documentation, 50 min., Director: Christoph Rüter. ( Summary from Christoph Rüter Filmproduktion)

Audio book

radio play

literature

Web links

Commons : Ulrich Wildgruber  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hans-Joachim Noack: Fighting game as a work of art . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1985, pp. 108 ( online - June 10, 1985 , report on Garry Kasparov's simultaneous fight against 31 opponents).
  2. ^ CineGraph - Lexicon for German-language film - Peer Moritz: Ulrich Wildgruber - Actor - Biography
personal data
SURNAME Wildgruber, Ulrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1999
Place of death Sylt