Biography:

Manfred Karge was born in 1938 in Brandenburg. After his studies at the Academy for Performing Arts, Helene Weigel asked him to join the Berliner Ensemble. There he worked as an actor and assistant director and met director Matthias Langhoff, with whom he worked for almost 25 years. In 1968, the directing duo, Karge and Langhoff, left for Benno Besson’s Volksbühne.

After 1978, Karge was engaged as a director, actor, and writer at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg and Bochum and, as of 1986, at the Vienna Burgtheater. In 1993, he returned to the Berliner Ensemble, where he still acts and directs today.

Karge is also well-known as a writer. His play about a woman taking on the identity of her dead husband during the 1930s and experiencing the Nazi period as a man was adapted for John Maybury’s film, Man to Man (1992), starring Tilda Swinton.