After a career as a law student, bank robber and importer of erotic film, Burkhard Driest had become an actor and writer, loved by the directors of the new avant-garde German for life ‘irregular’, and that he had also hit on the actress Romy Schneider, with whom she had a fleeting liaison. The German actor died yesterday in a hospital in Berlin at the age of 80 years, announced today his family.
Interpreter of a score of movies, Driest appeared in The cross of iron (1977) Sam Peckinpah, The ballad of Stroszek (1977) Werner Herzog and Querelle de Brest (1982) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, collaborating on the screenplay with the director (the setting in the world of the sailors, born from her direct experience in the port of Hamburg).
Before his career as an actor, screenwriter, and painter, Driest spent some time in prison in the mid – ’60s because he had robbed the Sparkasse in Burgdorf shortly before graduation in law and a friend had betrayed him causing it to shut down by the police. He was sentenced to five years, but then released after three years for good conduct. He was released from prison, Driest, he found employment as a casual worker in the port of Hamburg and in that city he snuck in the red-light district by smuggling in the meantime, as the importer of the porn film from Denmark. During an overnight trip to Copenhagen, where he had gone to buy the film erotic, had a car accident which forced him to give up work and his favorite hobby, painting, because of an injury to his left shoulder.
He spent much time writing a novel that became the movie Die Verrohung des Franz Blum (1974) directed by Reinhard Hauff, and interpreted by himself in the main role, the bad and Walter “Tiger” Kuul. The film then has not had more leading roles but has nevertheless attracted major directors.
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