Anton Diffring was a German actor with fair hair and piercin bluegrey eyes whose chief claim to fame rested on a talent for being thoroughly nasty. At least he was very often so on screen, where he played a series of Nazi villains in British films of the decades still obsessed with the second World War.
He was everyone’s favourite German officer, whether villain or not, and eventually got so tired of the type-casting that he fled from Britain to Rome in 1968. This helped him a little but not much: the Americans and Italians he worked for there had roughly the same idea about him.
It seemed even more unjust than type-casting usually s. He had been born into one of Germany’s – and Europe’s – oldest theatrical families, and studied drama in Vienna and Berlin before the war. And far from being a Nazi, he fled his homeland in 1939, and found himself interned in Canada during the conflict. He afterwards took many parts, mostly on the stage, there and in the United States, before coming to Britain in 1950 and finding a welcome at British film studios.
His first film here was State Secret, for Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, a Hitchcookian comedy thriller in which he was first seen to look the part as a nasty German. Ken Annakin’s Hotel Sahara followed in 1951, and casting agents became hooked on him as the epitome of the masyet race. It meant money in the bank buy not a lot of artistic satisfaction for a good actor with a much wider range than they supposed.
Diffring was stoical in face of all this and tried to continue a broader career on first the stage and later television. But he was generally brought back to the studios to be the man the public loved to hate and appeared with some distinction in this respect in The Colditz Story, The Heroes of Telemark, House of the secrets and Where Eagles Dare. He was also in I Am A Camera, Jack Clayton’s treatment of the Isherwood Berlin stories, which gave him a better, less one-dimensional part than usual, and in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451.
Diffring could not have succeeded as well as he did in the film world without being an actor of some presence, and this was noticed and appreciated not just by the fans, who also saw a romantic edge behind his villainy, but by filmmakers like François Truffaut, Sam Fuller nad Ken Russel, who recognised him as one of those character actors who never gave a less than distinctive performance. He appeared for Fuller in Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street and for Russel in Valentino, and is was unfortunate that both filmes failed to live up to expectations.
So, in the end, it was back to beeing typecast again, or to making occasional appearances in the theatre which were less likely to push his talent into a special box marked Nazi swine.
He was of those good actors who could never transcend his fate, which brought him fame and money but less than he deserved.
Anton Diffring, died in Nice, aged 70.
Article written by Derek Malcolm
Taken from The Guardian