Curd Jürgens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jürgens in a scene from Der Kommissar (1973)

Peer Schmidt, Klaus Kinski and Jürgens (right) in the German movie Bankraub in der Rue Latour (1961)

Curd Jürgens playing Sigmund Freud on the stage at Vienna's Theater in der Josefstadt (1979)

Curd Gustav Andreas Gottlieb Franz Jürgens (December 13, 1915 - June 18, 1982) was an Austrian stage and motion-picture actor of German-French parentage. He was usually billed in English-speaking films as Curt Jurgens. In 1945 Jürgens took Austrian citizenship.

[edit] Life and work

He was born in Solln, Bavaria, Germany. He began his working career as a journalist before becoming an actor at the urging of his actress wife, Louise Basler. He spent much of his early acting career on the stage in Vienna.

Critical of the Nazis in his native Germany, in 1944 he was shipped to a concentration camp for "political unreliables." Jürgens survived and after the war became an Austrian citizen. However, like many multilingual German-speaking actors, he went on to play soldiers in innumerable war movies. Notable performances in this vein include a meditative officer in the epic The Longest Day. His breakthrough screen role came in Des Teufels General (1955, The Devil's General) and he came to Hollywood following his appearance in the sensational 1956 Roger Vadim directed French film Et Dieu... créa la femme (And God Created Woman) starring Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, Jürgens made his first Hollywood film, The Enemy Below. Jürgens became an international film star. He eventually gained the role of the villain in Roger Moore's favourite James Bond film in The Spy Who Loved Me as Karl Stromberg, the sociopathic industrialist seeking to transform the world into an ocean paradise. His last appearance he had as Maître Legraine beside Alain Delon and Claude Jade in soviet spy-thriller Teheran 43 in 1981.

Although he appeared in over 100 films, Jürgens considered himself primarily a stage actor. He directed a few films with limited success, and also wrote screenplays. Curd Jürgens was married five times; one of his wives was actress Eva Bartok.

Showing his sense of humor, he titled his 1975 autobiography Sixty and Not Yet Wise.

Jürgens maintained a home in France but frequently returned to Vienna to perform on stage and that was where he died of a heart attack in 1982. He was interred in the city's Zentralfriedhof. Jürgens had suffered another heart attack several years before. During this he had a terrifying experience where he claimed he died and went to hell.

Curd Jürgens also made a number of films in the German and French languages. Some of his other English language films include: