Fritz Kortner
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Portrait by Günter Rittner 1967.
Fritz Kortner (May 12, 1892 – July 22, 1970) was an Austrian-born stage and film actor.
Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year he made his first appearance in a silent film. He became one of Germany's best known character actors. His speciality was playing sinister and threatening roles.
The coming of the Nazis to power forced Kortner to flee Germany in 1933, and he emigrated to the United States, where he found work as a character actor and play director for a time before returning to Germany in 1949. Upon his return, he became noted for his innovative staging and direction, particularly of classics such as his Richard III (1964) in which the king crawls over piles of corpses at the end.
Kortner died in Munich.
