Anton Diffring-Gap Rating 5/10

He was a character actor who worked continuously in motion pictures due to his aristocratic, German face and cool, clipped diction that made him ideal for type-casting in British and later American motion pictures as Nazis and other vile, despicable characters. What was ironic about his typecasting as a Nazi is that Diffring fled Nazi Germany in 1939.

He was born into a family that boasted generation of actors, and studied drama in Berlin and Vienna. At the outbreak of World War II, he fled the Nazi state and wound up in Canada, where he was interned as an enemy alien for the duration of the war. It was Canada that he began his acting career after World War II, acting primarily there and in the United States before moving to Britain in 1950.

He became popular playing Nazis in the post-war period, as the British film industry turned out film after film about the war, creating a great demand for actors who could convincingly play Germans, particularly nasty Nazis. Diffring could play nasty, and his career as a character actor soared. He was still going at it in the 1960s, when he began appearing in American films and international co-productions as German soldiers from both World Wars, including "The Blue Max" (1966), "Counterpoint" (1968), and that Turner Network Television staple, "Where Eagles Dare" (1969). He was still going at it in the 1970s and '80s, as he continued a nearly 40-year-long acting career that was terminated only by his death.

He was a much better actor than most of his roles required of him. Diffring broadened his range as an actor with his stage and television work, but the movies continually beckoned, as casting agents were hooked on him when it came to Nazi roles. It was that face that did it; that face that was his blessing, but yet his curse, He had the light hair and the piercing blue eyes and the chiseled face of the haughty aristocrat, the German Junker, but it was a face that could telegraph much in the few seconds that was the average shot of a motion picture. As a character actor, he got much done with less (time).

In Francois Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 451" (1966), he was cast in all likelihood as a counterpart to the Austrian actor Oskar Werner, so that Werner's own Germanness in the English setting wouldn't be as arch. He excelled as Werner's nemesis, as Diffring could create a mood, signal an entire story line, with just a look; dialog didn't matter. (He likely would have been a superstar in silent films, when it was "the faces" that mattered.)

Diffring tried to break out of typecasting, moving to Rome in 1968, but producers turned to him again and again to fill their needs for a foreign heavy. He appeared as one of the most infamous Nazis of all, Hitler's hangman, Reinhard Heydrich, in "Operation Daybreak" (1975), and as Hitler's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the American mini-series "The Winds of War" (1983). It made him a good living and it made him known, even if it did not fulfill his artistic ambitions.

What made his career such a success in terms of its longevity and fecundity was that Diffring was an actor who was enjoyable to watch. From Jack Clayton's "I Am a Camera" to Terrence Fisher's "The Man Who Could Cheat Death" (1959); from Sam Fuller's "Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street" (1973) to Ken Russell's "Valentino" (1977), he gave memorable performances, sandwiched in with all the Nazi heavies one career could possibly bear.

Anton Diffring died at his home in Chateauneuf-de-Grasse, France of natural causes on May 20, 1989. He was 70 years old.