Hanns Zischler (German actor, writer and dramaturge) Add a review

Hanns Zischler (born 18 June 1947) is a German actor, director, and writer.

Zischler started his professional career as a lecturer and translator. Starting in 1968, he worked with the Berliner Schaubühne, where he served as a dramaturge and assistant director to Peter Stein and Klaus Michael Grüber. Zischler has stayed active as a writer and publisher to the present, receiving a number of literary prizes in Germany such as the Friedrich-Baur-Preis (2004), the Heinrich Mann Prize (2009), the Preis der Literaturhäuser (2013), and the August-Graf-von-Platen-Preis (2022).

As an actor, he appeared in Wim Wenders's early films Summer in the City (1970) and Kings of the Road (1976). Since the mid-1970s, Zischler is a regular face in German film and television, usually as a character actor. He has appeared in over 300 film and television productions. Next to the Wenders films, among his internationally known roles are Hans in Steven Spielberg's film Munich and the Russian Mafia's boss Igor Sergeyevich Baklanov in the 1996 pilot movie Der Clown.

He is known for German and Swedish television viewers for his role as Josef Hillman in the second season of the Martin Beck crime TV series. In 2026, he played a leading role as Thomas Mann in the award-winning film Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski.