Karl Gerhart Fröbe, better known as Gert Fröbe (pronounced ) (February 25, 1913 – September 5, 1988), was a German actor who starred in many films, including the James Bond film Goldfinger as Auric Goldfinger and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as Baron Bomburst and in "Der Räuber Hotzenplotz" as Hotzenplotz
Fröbe made several appearances in big all-star casts in the 1960s, including the films The Longest Day, Is Paris Burning?, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Due to his thick German accent, Fröbe was dubbed in some of his classic roles, including by British actor Michael Collins in Goldfinger. He also appeared in $ (1971) with Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty.
While Fröbe was a member of the Nazi Party before and during World War II, he aided German Jews by hiding them from the Gestapo before 1945. Owing to his connection to the Nazi Party, the film Goldfinger was banned in Israel until he was publicly thanked by a Jewish family.
Fröbe gained early fame in one of the first movies made after WWII, called Berliner Ballade (The Ballad of Berlin, 1948), as a very thin man. That changed rapidly in later movies. In 1958 Fröbe was cast as the villain in the Swiss-German movie Es geschah am hellichten Tag (It Happened in Broad Daylight), which was novelised by Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. His role as an insane murderer of children drew the attention of the producers of the James Bond movie Goldfinger (1964) and he was finally to play one of the most remarkable and remembered villains of the series, gold tycoon Auric Goldfinger.
Aside from acting, Fröbe also was a prolific reciter of lyric poetry, especially of Christian Morgenstern and Joachim Ringelnatz.
Fröbe died, aged 75, in September 1988 from a heart attack.
Trivia
Gert Fröbe on a 2000 German stamp
In the film Joe Dirt, actor Christopher Walken's character, protected by the United States witness protection program, changed his name to Gert B. Frobe. Both Fröbe and Walken have played Bond villains.
References
^ Associated Press. (1988, 6 September). Gert Frobe, an Actor, Dies at 75.
External links
Gert Fröbe at the Internet Movie Database
Preceded by
Lotte Lenya
Official James Bond villain actor
1964
Succeeded by
Adolfo Celi
Persondata
NAME
Fröbe, Gert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
German actor
DATE OF BIRTH
February 25, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH
Planitz
DATE OF DEATH
September 5, 1988
PLACE OF DEATH
Munich, Germany
NewPP limit report
Preprocessor node count: 597/1000000
Post-expand include size: 3193/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 1090/2048000 bytes
Expensive parser function count: 0/500
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Fr%C3%B6be"
Categories: 1913 births | 1988 deaths | Deaths by myocardial infarction | German actors | German film actors | People from Saxony | German people of World War II
Views
Article
Discussion
