Heiner Lauterbach, the German actor who left nothing out, on screen or on the page

Heiner Lauterbach

Photo: Stuart Mentiply / GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 10, 1953 Cologne, Germany
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Experiment, The Collini Case, Stalingrad
Awards	Deutscher Filmpreis (shared) · Bambi · Bayerischer Filmpreis · Bayerischer Fernsehpreis · Bayerischer Filmpreis (lifetime achievement) · Bayerischer Verfassungsorden

Heiner Lauterbach once gave his memoir a title he would never be allowed to forget: Nichts ausgelassen, nothing left out. It was a promise about the drinking, the drugs, the marriages and the long nights that German tabloids had already been chronicling in fragments, and he kept it. What the book could not predict is where the same man would end up once the excess was behind him. German television now reaches for him when it needs someone to carry the country’s heaviest leftovers: an Auschwitz defendant, an eminent lawyer in a courtroom that exposes how Nazi crimes were allowed to lapse, a Jewish survivor who stops waiting for the police.

For a generation of West German viewers he was the smooth, cynical man in the good suit, the type a film writer’s book about him summed up as Der sanfte Macho, the gentle macho. Many assumed the role and the man were the same, and the memoir did little to argue otherwise. The career tells a stricter story. Behind the image sits a craftsman who learned a trade before he learned to act and who has rarely gone a season without work.

He was born in Cologne on 10 April 1953, the son of Hans Lauterbach, a Cologne plumbing contractor. The backup plan was literal: after leaving school he trained as a gas and water fitter. From 1970 he studied at the Schauspielschule der Keller, the drama school attached to Cologne’s Theater der Keller, and stage engagements in Cologne, Würzburg and Munich followed. His first screen credits in the mid-1970s are the kind biographies prefer to skip, three entries in the Schulmädchen-Report sex-comedy series and re-enactment scenes for the crime-appeal programme Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst.

Doris Dörrie’s Männer, released in English as Men…, changed everything in 1985. Lauterbach played Julius Armbrust, a prosperous advertising man who discovers his wife’s affair and moves into her lover’s flat-share without telling him who he is, opposite Uwe Ochsenknecht as the lover. The comedy made both men stars. At the 1986 Deutscher Filmpreis the two shared a Filmband in Gold for their performances.

Television turned the breakthrough into a fixed address. He was the Hamburg detective Oskar Faust in 24 episodes of the crime series Faust between 1994 and 1997, and he worked with Dieter Wedel on the five-part thriller Der Schattenmann in 1996. Helmut Dietl cast him as the film producer Oskar Reiter in Rossini in 1997, an ensemble satire set around a Munich restaurant, beside Götz George and Mario Adorf. In Der Campus, adapted from Dietrich Schwanitz’s novel in 1998, he was a sociology professor whose career collapses after a student’s accusation. Joseph Vilsmaier’s Marlene had him as the producer Erich Pommer in 2000.

The same years produced the other Lauterbach, the one on the front of the boulevard press. He was married to the actress Katja Flint from 1985 to 2001, though the couple separated in 1991, and had a son with her; from 1996 to 2000 he was with the actress Jenny Elvers. When Nichts ausgelassen appeared in 2006 it laid out those relationships and the excess around them with unusual candour, and in interviews he has said he regrets none of it. The problem with that candour is what it did to the reception of his work. The book made the life the headline and the acting the footnote, and for years profiles circled back to the nights. It also hardened a cliché he had partly invited, the charming cad, at exactly the moment his best work was moving away from it.

That movement is clearest in the last fifteen years. In Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Russian war epic Stalingrad in 2013 he played a fanatical German lieutenant colonel. Simon Verhoeven’s Willkommen bei den Hartmanns, known in English as Welcome to Germany, used his vanity as comedy in 2016: a chief surgeon fighting age while his wife takes a Nigerian refugee into the family home. Marco Kreuzpaintner’s Der Fall Collini, released internationally as The Collini Case, gave him the revered lawyer Richard Mattinger in 2019, in a film about how a quiet change in West German law let Nazi-era crimes expire. In the series Deutsches Haus, streamed as The Interpreter of Silence in 2023, he played Wilhelm Boger, one of the real defendants at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial. A year later, in Turmschatten, he was Ephraim Zamir, a Holocaust survivor who takes matters into his own hands after neo-Nazis attack his adopted daughter.

There is a parallel career many viewers never connect to his face. Until 1990 Lauterbach was the regular German voice of Christopher Walken, including The Deer Hunter, and he also dubbed Kevin Costner, Richard Gere and Gérard Depardieu. In 2003 he was among the founding members of the Deutsche Filmakademie, in 2019 he became an honorary professor at the Hochschule Macromedia, and the same year he launched Meet Your Master, an online platform of paid video classes taught by German public figures.

His current run is unusually dense for an actor in his seventies. The ARD thriller Hagen Benz – Das Böse in dir, broadcast in November 2025, cast him as the former detective of the title, opposite Julia Koschitz. In February 2026 Marc Rothemund’s romantic comedy Ein fast perfekter Antrag paired him with Iris Berben as a couple for the first time on the big screen, with Lauterbach as Walter, a retired widower who writes pedantic restaurant reviews. In May came Ein Münchner im Himmel – Der Tod ist erst der Anfang, David Dietl’s modern take on Ludwig Thoma’s satire, with Lauterbach as Franz Xaver Zeller; Dietl is the son of the director who made Rossini. On 30 October 2026 Netflix released Das Geschenk, an ensemble comedy directed by Vanessa Jopp and streamed internationally as The Birthday Gift, in which he plays Hans, the eccentric father of Jeanne Goursaud‘s character, at a child’s birthday party that falls apart.

In September 2001 he married the Lebanese-born model Viktoria Skaf. They have a daughter, Maya, born in 2002, and a son, born in 2007, and live at Sankt Heinrich on Lake Starnberg. Lauterbach has said he gave up drinking and that he could not have done it without her.

The next stop is a stage. In February 2027 he begins a German tour of Like a Hobo, an evening of stories by Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and O. Henry read against the blues of guitarist Timo Gross and the Cologne Blues Club, running into late March. For a man heard in German cinemas for half a century, often in someone else’s voice, it is a telling choice: this time the stories are his to pick, and nothing has to be left out.