17/03/2003

The cinematographic icon of German and European Cinema, Karlheinz Boehm, celebrated his 75th birthday last Sunday. Boehm started out as the elegant young lover in Arthur Maria Rabenalt's Alraune (1952) and in the film operetta Der unsterbliche Lump (1953). He featured in over thirty films during the following decade, still typecast as the stiff juvenile hero in Ernst Marischka's hugely popular Sissi trilogy, starring with Romy Schneider (1955-57). Boehm attempted a change in British, French and American films, and succeeded almost too well as the self-conscious serial killer in Michael Powel’s Peeping Tom (1960). He subsequently appeared in the striptease thriller Too Hot to Handle (1959, UK), the legal drama thriller La Croix des vivants (1960, France), as a Nazi officer in Vincente Minnelli's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962, US) and as a sadistic agent in The Venetian Affair (1966, US).

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A second German career began in 1972 thanks to a fruitful collaboration with Fasbinder leading to a series of different parts. Boehm was the worldly-wise Prussian councillor Effi Briest (1974), then the sadistic husband in Martha (1974), the homosexual art dealer in Fox and His Friends (1975), and finally the arrogant, middle-class communist Tillmann in Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven (1976).

Boehm has devoted much of the last fifteen years to promoting charities for starving children in Central Africa and Ethiopia through his project, called “Menschen fuer Menschen” (MfM).