Biography:

Gottfried Richter was born in 1947. He studied acting at the Hans Otto Academy of Theater in Leipzig and joined the Rostock Volkstheater ensemble in 1970; in 1974, he moved back to Leipzig, where he worked for the next fourteen years.

On stage, Richter played many characters, from Don Carlos to Che Guevara. From 1987 to 1990, the Staatsoperette in Dresden recognized his talents as an actor, dancer, and singer by hosting him as a guest performer. He appeared in the leading role of Ethan in the spectacular rock opera Der König David Bericht (King David’s Report), based on Stefan Heym’s novel. From the early 1990s to 1997, Richter worked at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. Among other roles, he played McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—in over 250 performances. From 1999 to 2012, he was employed full-time at the Mecklenburgische Staatstheater in Schwerin, where he played in Quartet, The Robbers, Hamlet, and Clockwork Orange.

On screen, Richter has acted in films and on television. One of his first film roles was the lead in Günter Reisch’s Unterwegs zu Lenin. In this GDR/Soviet coproduction, he played a young German communist on his adventurous way to Moscow. Ten years later, he was cast in the role of Trojanovicz, a man who has an affair with Franziska Linkerhand in Lothar Warneke’s literary adaption Our Short Life. In 1991, Richter played the leading role in the seven-part television production Luv und Lee, a story about a skipper who spends more time away from home than with his family. Gottfried Richter’s most recent television role was as a murderer in Kai Wessel’s crime story Mörderische Hitze.