Farewell to Bruno Ganz, unforgettable star of The Sky Above Berlin

Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, one of the finest and most versatile film and theater actors of recent years, died today in Zurich at the age of 77. Born in Zurich in 1941, Ganz was the son of a Swiss mechanical worker and an Italian mother, and he acted with great directors, including Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Stein.

His first performance was in 1960, when, at the age of nineteen, he obtained a role in Der Herr mit der schwarzen Melone, for which, however, he did not achieve great success, having to wait until the 1970s for the turning point in his career and devoting himself mainly to the theater: and it was thanks to the theater that he returned to the limelight, thanks also to the recognition as actor of the year according to Theater heute magazine, obtained in 1973 in Germany thanks to his theatrical performances. It was in 1976 that he returned to the cinema, with the German films Der sanfte Lauf and Sommergäste, but his definitive consecration came the following year with Wim Wenders’ The American Friend, in which Ganz starred alongside Dennis Hopper (the film was later shown at the 30th Cannes Film Festival, although it did not win awards).

After taking part in Werner Herzog’s celebrated Nosferatu, with Klaus Kinski as the infamous vampire (Ganz instead plays real estate agent Jonathan Harker), he starred in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s Oggetti smarriti (1980), kicking off a series of collaborations with Italian directors. However, the role for which he is perhaps most famous dates from 1987: the unforgettable Damiel, the starring angel in Wim Wenders’ masterpiece, The Sky Over Berlin, which won best director at the 40th Cannes Film Festival, for which he also competed for the Palme d’Or.

In Italy, Bruno Ganz has worked with Silvio Sodini, playing, in 2000, the part of Fernando Girasole in Bread and Tulips (a role that earned him the David di Donatello as best actor), and with many other authors: again with Giuseppe Bertolucci in La domenica specialmente, with Piergiorgio Gay in La forza del passato, and with Jo Baier in the Italian-German production La fine è il mio inizio, where he plays the writer Tiziano Terzani. In recent years, he has also participated in a number of widely acclaimed films, such as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Fall (2004), a film also and perhaps especially famous thanks to his masterful portrayal of Adolf Hitler, Francis Ford Coppola’s Another Youth (2007), Ridley Scott’s The counselor (2013), and Alain Gsponer’s Heidi (2015), where he plays the grandfather of the little Swiss shepherdess. His last performance was in 2018, when he got a part in The House of Jack, a Lars von Trier film starring Matt Dillon and Uma Thurman.

Bruno Ganz’s numerous awards include, in addition to the aforementioned David di Donatello as best actor in 2000, a Prix du cinéma suisse as best supporting actor in 2001 (for Bread and Tulips), a European Film Award nomination as best leading actor in 2004 (for The Fall), and the Pardo alla Carriera at the Locarno Film Festival in 2011. He also received the Legion of Honor from France, the Cross of Merit Class I of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Medal for Science and the Arts from Austria.

Pictured is Bruno Ganz in The Sky Over Berlin.

Farewell to Bruno Ganz, unforgettable star of The Sky Above Berlin

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