Job Actor
Years active 1927-1980
Top Roles Tramp, Ragheb, Dr. Richter, Steindorff, Kurt Richten
Top GenresDrama, War, Thriller/Suspense, Mystery, Romance, Crime
Top TopicsWorld War II, Spies, Book-Based
Top Collaborators , (Producer), ,
Shares birthday with Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, Steve McQueen, Harry Houdini  see more..

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Pursuit to Algiers

Pursuit to Algiers

Fan rating: 7.33
The Mummy's Curse

The Mummy's Curse

Fan rating: 7.33
Foreign Correspondent

Foreign Corresponden...

Fan rating: 7.14

Martin Kosleck Overview:

Character actor, Martin Kosleck, was born Nicolaie Yoshkin on Mar 24, 1904 in Barkotzen, Germany. Kosleck died at the age of 89 on Jan 15, 1994 in Santa Monica, CA .

MINI BIO:

German actor who fled to America in 1933, but hardly got a nibble at Hollywood films until World War II loomed. Suddenly Kosleck, with his sleek, dark evil looks, and narrow face and eyes, found himself in demand to portray Nazis and sinister villains generally - quite an irony for a Jewish player. Portrayed Goebbels ("like he was, without a single redeeming feature") several times. Demands for his services slackened after 1946.

(Source: available at Amazon Quinlan's Film Character Actors: an Illustrated Directory).

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Martin Kosleck Quotes:

Marcel De Lange: [Seeing the Creeper for the first time] Magnifique! The perfect Neanderthal Man!

Marcel De Lange: I see here in the evening paper that a woman was murdered in the neighborhood last night.
The Creeper: [Flatly] Yeah.
Marcel De Lange: Yes, her spine was snapped. I've often wondered why a man would want to snap a woman's spine.
The Creeper: [Flatly] She screamed.
Marcel De Lange: An annoying habit on the part of women... screaming.

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Martin Kosleck Facts
Although German-born Kosleck specialized in playing Nazis (he was once admiringly described by a film critic as "the definitive Nazi swine"), in reality his vehement opposition to Hitler and Naziism landed him on a Gestapo list of "undesirables" and he fled Germany one step ahead of a Gestapo death squad.
Later became an exhibited painter in Los Angeles and New York. Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis both owned some of his portraits.
During the World War II era many German actors fled the Nazi regime and emigrated to Hollywood, where they often played evil SS officers or murderous Nazi spies. Some of them came to resent being typecast that way, but Martin Kosleck had no such compunctions. An outspoken anti-Nazi in the German film industry, his activities earned him the enmity of Josef Goebbels, who became the Nazi Propaganda Minister. When the Nazis finally took over Germany, an arrest warrant was issued for Kosleck. He learned that he had already been tried in absentia and sentenced to death, and he escaped Germany as an SS hit team was tracking him down. The experience only deepened his hatred of Hitler and Naziism, and he once told an interviewer that his playing Nazi killers and exposing people to the evils of Naziism was his small way of paying back what the Nazis had done to him and his country.
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