Wolf Kaiser (26 October 1916 – 22 October 1992) was a German theatre and film actor. He grew up in Switzerland, where he studied chemistry and physiology. In 1937 he was deemed unfit for service in the Wehrmacht, and then went to Berlin where he trained as an actor.
Horst Frank (28 May 1929 – 25 May 1999) was a German film actor. He appeared in more than 100 films between 1955 and 1999. He was born in Lübeck, Germany and died in Heidelberg, Germany.
Otto Karl Robert Wernicke (30 September 1893, Osterode am Harz – 7 November 1965) was a German actor. He is best known for his role as police inspector Karl Lohmann in the two Fritz Lang films M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Married to a Jewish woman, he was only able to continue working in Germany after the Nazi Party took power in 1933 because he received a special dispensation from the Reich Chamber of Culture. In 1943, he portrayed Captain Smith in Titanic, the first film on the subject which was simply titled Titanic, and the first to combine various fictional characters and subplots with the true events of the sinking; both conventions went on to become a staple of Titanic films. After being cast in 1944 in the propaganda epic Kolberg, he was added to the Gottbegnadeten-Liste, a list of artists considered crucial to Nazi culture which Joseph Goebbels compiled for Adolf Hitler's approval.
Hannes Messemer (17 May 1924 – 2 November 1991) was a German actor from Dillingen an der Donau, Bavaria.
Horst Joachim Arthur Caspar (20 January 1913 – 27 December 1952) was a German actor, prominent in German theatre and film in the 1930s and 1940s. His postwar career was cut short by his sudden death at 39.
Caspar was born in Radegast, the son of Max Caspar, an army officer. He had one Jewish grandparent. His mother Emmy died when he was 18 months old, and he was raised by his aunt in Berlin. He attended the Treitschke-Reform-Realgymnasium in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. In 1932 he took his abitur (school leaving exam), but did not go to university, since he had already decided to be an actor. He took acting lessons at the school of Ilka Grüning and Lucie Höflich, along with future stars of German cinema such as Lilli Palmer, Inge Meysel and Brigitte Horney. In the late 1930s Caspar, a handsome young man, appeared regularly in German films and on the stage. He was taken up by the director Saladin Schmitt and became a leading man at his theatre in Bochum, where he performed in plays by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller. When he gave his final performance in Richard II in 1939, he received 108 curtain calls.Under the Nazi regime's anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Caspar was classed as a Mischling (mixed race) of the second degree. Despite his part-Jewish ancestry, he continued to work as an actor. This was partly because he enjoyed the protection of Schmitt, who as a homosexual was no friend of the Nazi regime. But he also enjoyed the patronage of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels personally vetted cases of part-Jewish performers and allowed a number of popular part-Jewish actors to continue working.Caspar's first leading film role was as the young Schiller in Friedrich Schiller – The Triumph of a Genius. In 1940 Caspar joined one of the most important German theatres of the time, the Schiller Theatre in Berlin. In 1942 he performed at the prestigious Burgtheater in Vienna. This was regarded as a "rare and special privilege" for a part-Jewish actor in a city where all Jews had been purged from cultural life.In 1943 Caspar was engaged by the director Veit Harlan to play the young August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who in 1807 defended the Prussian fortress town of Kolberg against the French during the Napoleonic Wars, in Kolberg, an epic film produced on the orders of Goebbels. This was only Caspar's second leading film role, but it is the one for which he is now best remembered, despite the fact that film was finished only shortly before the end of World War II and was seen by few people at the time.
On 20 January 1944 Caspar married a 22-year-old actress Antje Weisgerber (1922–2004). She gave birth to a son and a daughter. After the end of the war Caspar moved to Düsseldorf where he again worked in the theatre and in films. His last role was as a reporter named Peter Zabel in crime film called The Orplid Mystery, produced in 1950. In 1952 he recorded an LP of poetry readings, including works by Schiller and Goethe. Caspar died suddenly in Berlin in December 1952 of a stroke at the age of 39. His son Frank died on the day of his father's funeral, aged eight. His widow had a successful film career extending into the 1970s. All three are buried at St Anne's churchyard in Berlin-Dahlem.
Willy Birgel (19 September 1891 – 29 December 1973), born Wilhelm Maria Birgel, was a German theatre and film actor.
Karl Valentin (born Valentin Ludwig Fey, 4 June 1882 in Munich – 9 February 1948 in Planegg) was a Bavarian comedian. He had significant influence on German Weimar culture. Valentin starred in many silent films in the 1920s, and was sometimes called the "Charlie Chaplin of Germany". His work has an essential influence on artists like Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Loriot and Helge Schneider.
Harry Meyen (born Harald Haubenstock; 31 August 1924 – 15 April 1979) was a German film actor. He appeared in more than 40 films and television productions between 1948 and 1975. In the 1960s he also worked as a theatre director in West Germany.
Paul Joseph Verhoeven (23 June 1901 – 22 March 1975) was a German actor as well as a film and theatre director.
Hans Söhnker (11 October 1903 – 20 April 1981) was a German film actor. He appeared in more than 100 films between 1933 and 1980. He was born in Kiel, Germany and died in West Berlin, West Germany.