Thomas Fritsch

Did You Know?

• He was encouraged to become an actor at age 16 by director and actor Gustaf Gründgens.
• In 2006, Fritsch revealed he was bisexual.

Life

Thomas Fritsch came into the world on 16 January 1944 in Dresden, born to the well-known actor Willy Fritsch and the dancer Dinah Grace. After the Second World War ended, his family relocated to Hamburg. When Thomas was sixteen, the director and actor Gustaf Gründgens pushed him toward a career in acting, leading to three years of training at a school in Hamburg-Pöseldorf. He made his film debut at seventeen in the 1962 Austrian movie Julia, Du bist zauberhaft, acting alongside Lilli Palmer.

He then worked with Daliah Lavi on Black-White-Red Four Poster, which helped make him a teen idol, and his face often appeared on the cover of the youth magazine Bravo. In 1963, he appeared in And So to Bed with Hildegard Knef. The only film he ever made with his father was 1964’s Das hab ich von Papa gelernt, and they later shared the screen twice more in ZDF television specials: Das gibts doch zweimal in 1965 and Andere Zeiten, andere Sitten. Die Thomas-Fritsch-Show in 1967.

His other film credits from that period include Drei Männer in Santa Cruz, Onkel Toms Hütte, and a role as one of the three men in Drei Männer im Schnee, among many others. During the 1970s, he made multiple appearances on the television series Der Kommissar and Derrick. Starting in 1977, he took a lead role in the popular series Drei sind einer zuviel, created by Barbara Noack, where he played a man caught in a love triangle, a part that boosted him to the status of one of Germany’s most beloved actors.

He also starred in the 1989 television series Rivalen der Rennbahn. In 2004, he returned to the big screen as the villainous Earl of Cockwood in Der Wixxer, a comedy that parodied the German Edgar Wallace films from the 1960s. Fritsch built a strong reputation as a voice actor. He provided the German voice for Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and Proof of Life.

He voiced Scar in the German dub of The Lion King in 1994, Diego the Smilodon in Ice Age and its sequels starting in 2002, and Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its sequels. In the 2000s, he took over the role of Lumiere from the late Joachim Kemmer for the “Human Again” DVD feature of Beauty and the Beast. His final performance was as the narrator in the 2018 children’s film Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer, based on Michael Ende’s Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver.

In his personal life, Fritsch split his time between a home in Munich and another on the Greek island of Mykonos. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1990. He publicly came out as bisexual in 2006. In 2019, news broke that he had dementia and was living in an assisted care facility. Fritsch died on 21 April 2021 in Berlin at the age of 77, and his ashes were buried at sea near the island of Sylt.