Klaus Maria Brandauer

The Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who comes from Altaussee in Styria, made his stage debut in 1963 at the Landestheater Tübingen, where he played Claudio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Since then his artistic career has taken him to the Landestheater Salzburg, the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, the Theater in the Josefstadt in Vienna, and, ultimately, to the Vienna Burgtheater, where he has been a permanent member of the ensemble since 1972, playing such roles as Schiller’s Don Carlos, Molière’s Tartuffe, Lessing’s Nathan, and Shakespeare’s Lear. Brandauer made his international breakthrough in István Szabó’s film of Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, for which he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1982. With Szabó as director he subsequently appeared in Oberst Redl and Hanussen. Other significant film productions have included the James Bond series Never Say Never Again and Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa. For all his success in film, Brandauer has remained loyal to the theater and from 1983 to 1989 played Hofmannsthal’s Everyman at the Salzburg Festival; for several years he has been a regular guest at the Berlin Ensemble, where he has undertaken the title roles in Schiller’s Wallenstein and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and the judge Adam in Kleist’s The Broken Jug. In 1989 Brandauer made his directorial debut: among the awards he received for the film Georg Elser – Einer aus Deutschland was the German Film Prize. He has also directed such theater productions as Brecht/Weill’s The Threepenny Opera at the Admiralspalast in Berlin and Wagner’s Lohengrin at Opera Cologne. In 2013 Brandauer, who teaches at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, received the Honorary Ring of the Vienna Burgtheater and, in 2014, the Nestroy Theater Prize for his life’s work.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 28 August 1999 with a reading from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, along with music played by Lars Vogt.

August 2015