Manfred Krug

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Manfred Krug (born February 8, 1937 in Duisburg) is a German actor and singer. After moving to East Germany at the age of 13, he worked at a steel plant before beginning his acting career on the stage and, ultimately, in film. By the end of the 1950s he had several film roles, and in 1960 he appeared in Frank Beyer's successful war movie Fünf Patronenhülsen (Five Cartridges). Many more film roles followed, with Krug often cast as a socialist hero. Krug also achieved notability as a popular jazz singer, often in collaboration with composer Guenther Fischer.

In 1976 the East German forbade Krug to work as an actor and singer because he contributed in protests against the deportation of Wolf Biermann. On April 20, 1977 he requested to leave the GDR and as soon as he got the aproval he left the GDR and moved to Schöneberg in the West German part of Berlin.

After moving back to West Germany he very soon got new roles as an actor but very rarely sung in public for a long time. In 1978 Krug appeared as one of the male leads of the action-drama television series Auf Achse, and would continue to appear on the series until 1995, one year before the show ended its long run. Krug's various television roles even included a two-year stint on the children's program Sesamstraße, the German version of the American children's program Sesame Street. In the 1980s and 1990s, he also starred as Hauptkommissar Paul Stoever in the Tatort series of TV crime movies, which would eventually run for forty installments in total.