Oskar Werner
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Oskar Werner (November 13, 1922 – October 23, 1984) was an Austrian actor. Born Oskar Josef Bschließmayer in Vienna, he started off his career as a stage actor, starring in the Shakespearean repertoire, until his film debut in Der Engel mit der Posaune in 1948.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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, and also played a smaller but no less significant part as the student with the scarf in Max Ophüls' 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 François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962), and he 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). Truffaut had been skillfully editing the film so that any scene in which Werner reacted true to his character, Truffaut cut from the final print. Truffaut was also keeping a diary in which he made many notes, all antagonistic toward Werner, and many of which he made public during the project. Werner had seen book burning in Vienna after the Nazi annexation by the Third Reich. He never could forget all that happened while "people just stood around watching." To him, Truffaut's treatment, "his exegegsis, of the novel was infantile and without the true inspiration of the novel." Werner had collaborated with great success with Truffaut on "Jules and Jim." Also, only an actor, could really understand the difficulty of changing the actor's character at practically the "last moment" ( beginning of filming). This is what happened in this case. Oskar was initially to play the part of the "Captain" and had been preparing for that. Then, at the last moment, the actor slated to play the part of Montag dropped out and Truffaut asked Oskar to take on that part. Everyone who knew Werner knew his request for every project was "Time and a Character." Also Tuffaut's "exegisis" of the novel resulted in, what seemed to Werner, aligning the audience with those people who "stood around with their arms folded" during Kristallnacht. That being the case, when once Werner and Truffaut had worked in collaboration, this stubbornness on Truffaut's part, never to refer to Werner as one who had experiened real book burinngs in Vienna as a teenager, caused real friction between the two. And was, probably at the base, almost universal, of the critics' referring to the fim as "flawed." I corresponded with Werner in 1982 and he wrote back "that he could not agree more with (my) analysis of the film. 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.
[edit] 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.
