photo:
http://www.thegoldenyears.org/oskar_werner.jpg
Biography
Stage career
Universally regarded as one of Western Europe's foremost stage actors, Oskar Werner was 18 years old when he made his stage bow at the Burgtheater in his native Vienna. A lifelong pacifist, Werner did everything he could to avoid conscription in the Axis army during World War II; when he finally was forced into a uniform, he deserted at the earliest opportunity.
Film career
After the war, Werner resumed his theatrical career, only reluctantly making his first film in 1948; "I am married to the theatre, and the films are only my mistress" he would later declare. In 1951, he made his English-language film debut as "Happy," an enigmatic German prisoner of war, in 20th Century-Fox's Decision Before Dawn. When Fox reneged on its promise to develop Werner into a Hollywood star, he went back to his true love, the theatre, vowing to only appear in films that intrigued him. In 1955, he essayed the title role in Mozart, also played a smaller but no less significant part as the student with the scarf in Max Ophuls' Lola Montes. Then it was back to the stage, culminating with his formation of Theatre Ensemble Oskar Werner in 1959. Werner's definitive screen performance was the romantic intellectual Jules in Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), became an international star as a result, though it was his portrayal of the philosophical Dr. Schumann in Ship of Fools (1965) that earned the actor his only Golden Globe nomination.
His friendship with Truffaut soured after their second collaboration, Fahrenheit 451 (1966); exhibiting profound disillusionment, Truffaut complained (not without justification) that Werner had become a "cold" performer. During the last two weeks of filming, things became so bad that the director and actor would not even speak to each other. Werner would stay in his trailer all day drinking wine, and when he did come out he would only communicate with Truffaut through messages passed between him and other crew members. Towards the end of the film, Werner had also had his hair cut differently from the appearance of his character Guy Montag in earlier parts of the film — look closely and you can see that it has been fluffed up to make it look like it previously was.
Later career
Later in his career, Werner also played the murderer opposite Peter Falk in an episode of the Columbo TV series entitled "Playback" (1975). His alcoholism resulted in the decline of his acting career and he died of a heart attack in 1984, at the age of 62, just before he was scheduled to deliver a lecture at a German drama club.
