Mario Adorf becomes 95: new roles no longer have to be

After a large train station, he doesn’t feel like it. Not after Sunday speeches, not after fire brigade or rifle brass bands, as they do on large, round birthdays from big people like him. Mario Adorf (95) wants to be alone – alone with his wife Monique and a few dear guests in the evening, maybe eight, at most ten.

But it cannot be so precise if you are a celebrity and have a big birthday that only a few experience. Mario Adorf is a legend during his lifetime. The large bouquets that are braided to a land on land can hardly be avoided. Federal President Frank -Walter Steinmeier (69) already congratulated his congratulations in advance: “They amazed us viewers and listeners, to laugh, to think – and sometimes also to cry. They showed us how strong, sensitive and human acting can be.”

The big character actor has all the acting opportunities on it, from the large gesture to wink. A world citizen who lives in France and Germany, but when his homeland calls a small Eifel town. Actually he is a Swiss one, because he was born in Zurich in 1930, his origin goes back to Caspar Adorf, the German grandfather. This was a master saddler in the Eifel town of Mayen and emigrated to Switzerland towards the end of the 19th century. He married an Alsatian and had four children with her.

His daughter Alice Adorf worked as an X -ray assistant in southern Italy and returned from Calabria to Zurich in 1930 – pregnant with Mario. Father was the doctor Matteo Menniti, who was already married. So the child was born in the world. In the same year, Alice Adorf with her son Mario was deported to Germany as a “undesirable foreigner”. She went back to Mayen.

The small town shaped him because childhood and youth were hard. The mother rackled off as a seamstress, the money was so scarce that she had to put her child into the orphanage at times so that there was something to eat. He still made his way. Abitur, studies Generale at the University of Mainz (philosophy, psychology, criminology, literature, music history, theater science), later in Zurich.

He started from Mayen, the world conquered. Over 200 films in over 60 years, a celebrity in Italy, France, England, Germany, Austria and Switzerland anyway. A century actor. He doesn’t particularly like to hear that. And “world star” not at all. “I don’t find myself a world star. World stars come solely from Hollywood,” he once told the “Cologne City Agency”. “But I couldn’t establish myself in Hollywood. Even the best known European actors like Marcello Mastroianni or Gérard Depardieu weren’t world stars.”

Hollywood had called in 1964. For his western “Major Dundee” with stars like Charlton Heston and Senta Berger, director Sam Peckinpah, who looks like a Mexican. The film was not particularly successful. Nevertheless, he was suggested to “stay in America and continue to play Mexicans there,” he told the “Spiegel”. “But I had a lot of nicer offers in Germany and Italy.”

He made a cinema, primarily in the role of the villain and big films such as “Deadlock” (1970), “The lost honor of Katharina Blum” (1975), “Bomber & Paganini” (1976).

He was shooting with Claudia Cardinale and Sean Connery (“Das Rote Zelt”, 1969), with Alec Guinness (“Smiley’s people – agent on his own behalf”, 1982) or with Michael Caine (“The 4 1/2 trillion contract”, 1985). And with the German production “Die Blechtrommel” (1979) he even returned to Hollywood, where the grass adaptation of director Volker Schlöndorff won the Oscar as the best foreign language film.

He became a serial star in legendary TV multi-part such as “The Great Bellheim”, “The Schattenmann” and “The Semmeling affair”, and he played Popes and Karl Marx.

His wonderful roles in cult films by Helmut Dietl like “Rossini – or the murderous question are unforgettable, who slept with whom” and “Kir Royal”, where he threatened the gossip reporter baby shimmerless as a publicity -lean entrepreneur Heinrich Haffenloher: “I shit disch so wat with my yeld!”

But of all things, the film with which it all started, he regrets. In 1957 he played the supposed women’s murderer Bruno Lüdke in “At night when the devil came”, who was held responsible for 53 murders and three attempts at murder in 1943. Adorf received the Federal Film Award as the best young actor. In the 1990s it turned out that Lüdke was innocent, Nazi police officers had declared the mentally disabled man as a murderer for ideological reasons. He died in custody in 1944, presumably during “medical examinations of a born criminal”.

“With my role, I missed a man’s picture of a mass murderer who was none,” he told the “time”. “As an actor, I was wrong with this Bruno Lüdke … I gave a person who really lived a monstrous story that is not true at all.” He has feelings of guilt towards this victim and his relatives.

Such sentences are rarely heard from an actor. Mario Adorf, on the other hand, likes to speak plain text. He finds that many mistakes are made in Germany in the foreign debate. : “It is still pretended that the immigrants would have to integrate or even assimilate completely, or get out with them again!” People do not have to be assimilated, rather German society must also adapt. In the past, this was also successful with Italians and Poland. He finds “the development of the populist parties dramatically. That worries me. I went out of Italy in 2004 because of Berlusconi.”

Adorf does not expect Adorf that he returns to the camera at his age and after over 200 roles. “I am without any ambition in this direction – and without any hope,” he said in an interview with “Hörzu”. He also had to think very carefully about whether he can still do it physically. “It doesn’t have to be.” He was surprised to have achieved such an old age. He had an experience this year that was “very negative” this year. “There was a point that I thought: that is going now. I would have liked to let go.” Then he speaks from the end on the occasion of his 95th birthday and calls it “this waiting for something”, that is “not easy. Not as easy as I would like it to be.”