Hardy Krüger told no story as often and as well as the first encounter with John Wayne in 1961 in Tanzania. Wayne starred in Howard Hawks’ safari film Hatari!, with Kruger in a pretty big supporting role. Flamingos flew by Lake Manyara, and Krüger saw them for the first time in the hotel. “‘Kid,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard a thing or two about you. Let’s have a drink after dinner. I’ll wait for you at the bar.’” Krüger looked after Wayne. “The man seemed immense to me.”
He asked the chef for a few spoonfuls of olive oil, knowing what was to come. In fact, Wayne immediately ordered a double cognac and invited Krüger over, and when he hesitated, Wayne reportedly said, “Come on, be a man!” Krüger complied. Then the duke elaborated, somewhat awkwardly, that he had hoped the Germans would win World War II, alongside the Americans against the Soviet Union. Meanwhile he drank three tier cognacs. Hardy Krüger kept up, the olive oil protected him. When Wayne was drunk, he fell off the bar stool, unconscious, and Kruger, with the help of the cook, dragged the heavy man to his room. He couldn’t heave him onto the bed. “So that’s the story I don’t like to remember,” Krüger concludes the story he remembered so fondly.
“Hatari!” is a delightful purr about a team of animal catchers, Howard Hawks’ finest male film, but at the center of it is a young woman, Elsa Martinelli, who falls in love not with Hardy Krüger or the Frenchman Gérard Blain, but with the much older John Wayne . Krüger fell in love with Africa and bought a farm where he lived until the late 1960s. After he sold the property, he wrote his first book, Eine Farm in Afrika, at the instigation of Ernst Rowohlt and his friend, the Hamburg bookseller Felix Jud. It’s a good book. Hardy Krüger borrowed the tone from Hemingway, and his later novels, like Hemingway’s late novels, suffer from prolixity and a fondness for drawn-out dialogue. Hardy Krüger always wanted to be a writer and an aviator, and he has become both. He was also famous as an actor.
Eberhard Krüger was born on April 12, 1928 in Berlin-Wedding. The parents sent the thirteen-year-old to a Nazi boarding school, the Ordensburg Sonthofen. In 1943, the blond, blue-eyed, and extremely handsome boy was selected for the propaganda film “Junge Adler”, which was shot by Alfred Weidenmann in Babelsberg. During the shooting, the actors Hans Söhnker and Paul Florath informed the young people about the crimes of the regime. At first he didn’t want to believe it, but then he became a messenger for the resistance group.
Hardy Krüger was drafted into an SS division towards the end of the war, deserted, was allegedly sentenced to death in absentia and hid in the turmoil of the defensive battle in 1945. In 1946 he came to devastated Hamburg, became a bit actor at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus and spokesman for the NWDR. He got larger roles at the theater in Hanover. Krüger was already making his first films in the late 1940s and soon became a hit with farces such as “Island without Morals”, “The Girl from the South Seas”, “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”, “Alibi” and “Christel von der Post”. Movie star – the youngster on duty. “Liane, the girl from the jungle” made him a youth idol alongside Marion Michael in 1956.
Hostile to British journalists
A year later, the English director David Ward Baker hired him for “The One That Got Away” as the German flying officer Franz von Werra, who was able to escape from British and Canadian captivity. Already during the filming, Krüger was attacked by British journalists at press conferences and defended himself with a detailed interview. “The One That Got Away” was a success, also in England, and in 1959 brought Krüger a role in “Blind Date” by Joseph Losey, an American director who emigrated to England in the McCarthy era. Krueger played a young romantic artist who lurks in a clandestine affair with an older woman. He was then engaged alongside Charles Aznavour and Lino Ventura for the grotesque Taxi nach Tobruk, in which he naturally plays a German officer.
After that he made another German film, “The Dream of Lieschen Müller”, and traveled to Africa for “Hatari!”. Immediately thereafter, Hardy Krüger made the film of which he was most proud: Sundays with Sibyl (1962), a French work in which he plays a traumatized (Indochina) war veteran who befriends an orphan girl. The film won the 1964 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film – and Krüger landed a role in Robert Aldrich’s Flight of the Phoenix (1965), alongside James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Ernest Borgnine and Peter Finch. This film is the fourth classic of Krüger’s career, and Krüger is surprisingly compelling against the grain as a German engineer who draws kits for model airplanes. He later told equally captivating ankedotes about the notoriously lanky, hesitant-speaking James Stewart as he did about Peter Finch, with whom he shot the failed polar spectacle “The Red Tent” in Moscow for almost a year in 1968, which both didn’t bother them.
In 1966, Hardy Krüger co-starred in Montgomery Clift’s last film, The Defector, which was shot in Germany. It is to Krüger’s credit that he never wrote (nor spoke) about the seriously alcoholic and depressed Clift. In 1969, Krüger appeared in “The Secret of Santa Vittoria” and “The Battle of the Neretva” alongside Anthony Quinn and Yul Brynner, then in 1971 in the German television three-part series “The Knife”. However, television only interested him as a medium for his travel reports. As early as 1963 he had produced “Hardy’s logbook” for Radio Bremen; in the 1980s, “Weltenbummler” became a fascinating document of the Hardy Krüger tone that also characterizes his best short stories: “Ein Buch von Tod und Liebe”, early stories, only appeared in 2018 by Hoffmann & Campe.
In his career, which was full of strokes of luck, Krüger made another entry in film history: in Stanley Kubrick’s legendary historical film “Barry Lyndon” (1975), he played a Prussian officer alongside Ryan O’Neal. Before the shooting of “The Bridge from Arnhem” (1977) – Krüger of course as a German officer – Robert Redford called him in Munich to order a Swabian coffee machine. An anecdote that Krüger described in an enchantingly devoured way. In the war film “The Sea Wolves are Coming” (1979) Krüger plays a mercenary alongside the British veterans Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Roger Moore; In 1982 he made the devastating satire Flames on the Horizon with Sean Connery, the failed last film by the great director Albert Brooks. After that, Hardy Krüger was only in front of the camera for a few TV films, most recently in 2011 for “Family Secrets”, a confused two-parter, in which he had probably agreed because parts of it play in Africa.
He himself has long lived in the mountains of San Bernardino near Los Angeles with his third wife, Anita Parks. Anita accompanied him from 1986 on the shooting of “Weltenbummler” and took photos for the books on the series. In 2016 he wrote his memoir “What life allows itself – My Germany and I” and read from it in schools. He saw it as his last task to tell those who were born later about the war.
Berlin cosmopolitan Hardy Krüger died yesterday at the age of 93 in Palm Springs, California.