CHRISTINE KAUFMANN

29 Mar

(11 January 1945 - 28 March 2017)

The German actress was born in Austria but brought up in Munich where she trained in ballet and joined the Munich Opera as a dancer. She entered films in 1952 in a version of White Horse Inn and then made many more in Germany, including Mädchen in Uniform, the 1958 remake of the 1931 original, with Lilli Palmer and Romy Schneider. She then gained international recognition in 1959 opposite Steve Reeves in The Last Days of Pompeii. Later came Town Without Pity, filmed in Germany and Austria, with Kirk Douglas, for which she won the Golden Globe. She continued in German films until Taras Bulba in 1962, where she met and then married Tony Curtis, the first of her four husbands. She continued to be in demand mostly in European movie and TV productions and the occasional UK film such as Murders in the Rue Morgue, plus Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen and Percy Adlon’s Bagdad Café in 1987. Christine Kaufmann carried on making films, notching up over a hundred productions in her career. Her last film was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in 2014. She published two autobiographies and books on health and cosmetics, and had her own make-up brand.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

CHRISTINE KAUFMANN

DON RICKLES

DAVID STOREY