Kurt Raab(1941-1988)

Actor, director, screenwriter and production designer. Though born in what is present-day Czech Republic, he grew up in lower Bavaria. He made his stage debut in 1967 and was a co-founder of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 'Anti-Theatre' the following year. He starred in that director's stage productions and in films from the late 1960's (again mostly for Fassbinder), specialising in powerful portrayals of unsympathetic, even reprehensible characters, small-minded philistines, opportunists, mass murderers (Haarmann) and dictators (Hitler).