Ulrich Wildgruber
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 .
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.
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
- 1976 North German Theater Prize for the performance of Hjalmar Ekdal in Ibsen's Die Wildente
- 1986: Cross of Merit 1st Class of the Federal Republic of Germany
- 1987 Gordana Kosanović Actor Award
- 1988 Actor of the Year from Theater heute magazine for portraying Dr. Franz Schöning in Lulu
- 1997 Plaque from the Free Academy of the Arts, Hamburg
theatre
- 1963: Schweizererkas in Bertolt Brecht's mother Courage and her children under the direction of Gustav Manker with Dorothea Neff
- 1964: Tarragon in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- 1968: Title role in Kaspar by Peter Handke
- 1970: Title role in Victor or The Children in Power by Roger Vitrac (Director: Hans Neuenfels)
- 1972: Father in The Ignorant and the Insane by Thomas Bernhard (Director: Claus Peymann )
- 1972: Christopher Isherwood in Little Man: Now What? based on Hans Fallada (Director: Peter Zadek )
- 1973: Oswald in Ice Age by Tankred Dorst (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1974: Lear in King Lear by William Shakespeare (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1976: Title role in Othello by William Shakespeare with Eva Mattes as Desdemona (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1977: Title role in Hamlet by William Shakespeare (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1984: Title role in King Oedipus von Sophocles (Director: Jürgen Gosch )
- 1987: Title role in Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Direction: Wilfried Minks )
- 1988: Dr. Schön in Lulu by Frank Wedekind (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1990: Title role in The Theater Maker by Thomas Bernhard (Director: Peter Löscher)
- 1990: Title role in Torquato Tasso by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- 1991: Prospero in The Tempest by William Shakespeare
- 1991: Sculptor Arnold Rubek in When the Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1992: Professor Unrat in The Blue Angel based on Heinrich Mann (Director: Peter Zadek)
- 1997: Krapp in The Last Volume by Samuel Beckett (Direction: Ulrich Waller)
- 1999: Polonius in Hamlet by William Shakespeare with Angela Winkler and Otto Sander , (Director: Peter Zadek)
Filmography
- 1975: Ice Age - Director: Peter Zadek
- 1979: The Hamburg Disease - Director: Peter Fleischmann
- 1980: Meister Timpe - Director: Hartmut Griesmayr
- 1980: Mosch - Director: Tankred Dorst
- 1981: Who has the damage ... - Director: Dieter Wedel
- 1982: Schwarz Rot Gold : Alles in Butter - Directed by Dieter Wedel
- 1983: The Wild Fifties - Director: Peter Zadek
- 1984: Super - Director: Adolf Winkelmann
- 1984: Jagger and Spaghetti - Director: Karsten Wichniarz
- 1985: The Death of the White Horse - Director: Christian Ziewer
- 1986: Forever and Always - Director: Christel Buschmann
- 1987: Adrian und die Römer - Direction: Klaus Bueb and Thomas Mauch
- 1987: Bang! You are dead! - Director: Adolf Winkelmann
- 1987: Drachenfutter - Director: Jan Schütte
- 1988: Kalte Sonne - Director: Lars Becker
- 1988: Island of Illusion - Director: Herbert Brödl
- 1989: Melancholia - Director: Andi Engel
- 1990: Winckelmanns Reisen - Director: Jan Schütte
- 1990: The Hallo-Sisters - Director: Ottokar Runze
- 1990: Oh, Boris… - Director: Niki List
- 1990–1998: Shameless (TV series) - Director: Ulrich Waller
- 1991: The actor as arsonist - Director: Joachim Dennhardt
- 1994: The Bartholomew Night - Director: Patrice Chéreau
- 1994: Crime Scene: The Rest Area Murderer
- 1994: Felidae (speaking role)
- 1994: Deadly Legacy
- 1995: Pacts: The Sunset Boys
- 1996: Adelheid and her murderers (TV series, episode Murder was not on the program )
- 1997: The nephew
- 1998: The Adventure of Freedom - Director: Joachim Dennhardt
- 1998: Polizeiruf 110: Katz und Kater - Director: Manfred Stelzer
- 1998: Die Siebtelbauern - Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky
- 1998: Murderous Legacy - Exchange with a dead person - Director: Peter Patzak
- 1999: At the end of the corridor - Director: Michael Muschner
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
- Nobodaddy's Kinder , HÖR Verlag (January 1, 1998)
radio play
- 1997: Christa Kozik : The Enchanted Burglar - Director: Klaus-Michael Klingsporn (children's radio play - DLR Berlin)
literature
- Ulrich Wildgruber: The Salmon Train of Words. Alexander Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89581-083-5 .
- C. Bernd Sucher : Theater magician. Volume 1: Actors. Piper, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-492-03125-0 , pp. 296-302 and 333.
Web links
- Ulrich Wild Gruber in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Literature by and about Ulrich Wildgruber in the catalog of the German National Library
- Biography at cinegraph.de
- Ulrich Wildgruber Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
Individual evidence
- ^ 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).
- ^ 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 |