Wolfgang Kieling

Biography

Kieling's parents were amateur actors at a theatre club, where he made his stage debut as a child. At the age of six, he recorded his first record as a child soprano, followed by a career in children's radio, where he voiced 'Wölfchen' in the popular radio series "Kunterbunt", and made his feature film debut in Maria, die Magd (1936), directed by Veit Harlan. He continued acting on stage and in films before being conscripted to serve in the German Army during World War II in 1942, where he was severely wounded and captured in 1945. He was held in a Russian POW camp until 1949, during which he organized plays at various prison camps.

After his release, Kieling started appearing regularly again on stage and in film in both West and East Germany throughout the 1950's and 1960's, and eventually was offered a role in a major American film production, Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain (1966), where he played Gromek, an East German agent brutally slain by Paul Newman's character. He also played Gromek's brother in a scene that was deleted from the final print.

Appearing in a Hitchcock film did not lead to other roles in Hollywood, though Kieling had a small role in $ (aka, The Heist, 1971), starring Warren Beatty, and he also appeared in other European and English-language productions, such as the British films The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), and Amsterdam Affair (1968), where he portrayed the fictional Dutch detective Van der Valk several years before Barry Foster (another Hitchcock alumnus) was cast in the same role for the British TV series. He did much work on West German TV, including the first episode of Derrick ("Waldweg", 1974). The best of his later roles was in the film Out of Order (1984), originally titled Abwärts.