Wolfgang Kieling


Wolfgang Kieling was a German actor.

Biography

In films since childhood in his native Germany, Kieling appeared in a few American films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, 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,
Kieling had a small role in $, starring Warren Beatty. In a British film, Amsterdam Affair, he portrayed the fictional Dutch detective Van der Valk several years before Barry Foster was cast in the same role for the British TV series. He did much work on German TV, including the first episode of Derrick.
The best of his later roles was in the film Out of Order, originally titled Abwärts. In the German-language version of Disneys Alice in Wonderland he dubbed the Mad Hatter.
Early on, Kieling also became a dubbing actor for German dubs of foreign films, serving as the standard dubbing voice of Glenn Ford, Frank Sinatra, and he also dubbed Charlton Heston in the first part of the Planet of the Apes franchise. Thanks to his voice's similarity to that of Gert Günther Hoffmann, he would also replace Hoffmann as the dubbing voice of Paul Newman when Hoffmann was not available. On TV, he was especially known as the German voice of Bert from Sesame Street up until his death in 1985.
In October 1952 his wife Jola Jobst, whom he had married in 1950, committed suicide.

Selected filmography

Child actor