RIP Otto Mellies

Theater, film, radio, TV actor and voice dubber Otto Mellies died on Monday April 27, 2020. He was 89. Born in Schlawe in Pomerania on January 19, 1931. His mother, older sister and their children died shortly before the end of the war. His father was still a soldier at that time. His brother Eberhard, who later also worked as an actor, was drafted in the war, so that Mellies was on his own when he was 14 and worked as a groom for Russian soldiers. After attending school interrupted by the turmoil of the Second World War, Mellies applied to the Schwerin Theater at the age of 16 and received from the well-known actress. In 1956 the director Wolfgang Langhoff brought him to the German Theater in Berlin, where he had been a member of the ensemble for 50 years. His leading role was Nathan in Lessing's “Nathan the Wise” – he played this role a total of 325 times and wrote stage history with it. . “For me, theater was the mother of art. I did everything else, film, television, radio, on the side. But I enjoyed everything.” He was known to German Spaghetti Western fans as the German voice of Alberto Farnese in the 1985 western “White Apache” starring Sebastian Harrison.