by Hal Erickson
biography
Trained in Vienna and Berlin, Bernhard Wicki began acting in films in the 1950s. Once he was firmly established as a performer, Wicki turned director with the highly acclaimed "defeatist" drama The Bridge. His later directorial efforts ran hot (Saboteur: Code Name Morituri) and cold (The Visit); among his more worthwhile assignments were a brace of films based on the works of Joseph Roth (False Weight, Spider's Web) and the German-language sequences in Darryl F. Zanuck's mammoth The Longest Day (1962). He returned to acting on a sporadic basis in the mid-1970s, most memorably in Wim Wenders' Paris Texas (1984) and in the European TV miniseries Kidnapped (1978) and The Betrothed (1988). Bernhard Wicki was married to actress Agnes Fink.
