Christoph Waltz
Christoph Waltz (German: [ˈkʀɪstɔf ˈvalts]; born 4 October 1956) is an actor. He is known for playing villainous and supporting roles in English-language films since 2009. He has been primarily active in the United States.[1][2][3] His accolades include two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
His American breakthrough role came in Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, in which he played Hans Landa, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and the Cannes Film Festival Best Actor Award. Waltz collaborated with Tarantino again in Django Unchained (2012), for which he earned his second Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, this time for his performance as a bounty hunter.
He has also starred in Carnage (2011), The Zero Theorem (2013), Big Eyes (2014), Downsizing (2017), Alita: Battle Angel (2019), and The French Dispatch (2021). He appeared as Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond films Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021).
Early life[edit]
Waltz was born on 4 October 1956 in Vienna,[4] the son of Johannes Waltz, a German set designer, and Elisabeth Urbancic, an Austrian costume designer of Austrian and Slovenian descent.[5][6][7] Waltz comes from a family of theatrical heritage: his maternal grandmother was Burgtheater and silent film actress Maria Mayen, and his step-grandfather, Emmerich Reimers, and his great-grandfather, Georg Reimers, were both stage actors who also appeared in silent films.[6][8] Waltz's maternal grandfather, Rudolf von Urban, was a psychiatrist of Slovene descent[5][a] and a student of Sigmund Freud.[11] Waltz's father died when he was seven years old[6] and his mother later married composer and conductor Alexander Steinbrecher.[12][13] Steinbrecher was previously married to the mother of director Michael Haneke; as a result, Waltz and Haneke shared the same stepfather.[14]
Waltz had a passion for opera as a youth, having seen his first opera (Turandot with Birgit Nilsson in the title role) at around the age of ten. As a teenager, Waltz would visit the opera twice a week.[13] He was uninterested in theatre[6] and wished to become an opera singer.[11] After graduating from Vienna's Theresianum,[6] Waltz went to study acting at the renowned Max Reinhardt Seminar.[15] At the same time, he also studied singing and opera at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, but eventually decided that his voice was not good enough for an opera career.[8][16] In the late 1970s, Waltz spent some time in New York City where he trained with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. He studied script interpretation under Adler and credits his analytical approach to her teaching.[8]