Biography:

Eberhard Mellies (Heinz Solter) was born in Schlawe (now: Sławno, Poland) on June 8, 1929. He studied with the famous German actress Lucie Höflich at the Schwerin Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater acting school. After graduation, Mellies worked as an actor and director at the Schwerin theater and played at the Volksbühne and Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. In the mid-60s, he moved to the Volkstheater Rostock where he worked with Hanns Anselm Perten.

Mellies shared his acting career between theater and film. Since the beginning of the 60s, he had been listed as supporting actor or narrator in film credits of productions by the East German DEFA Studio. However, one of his most successful roles was the non-party engineer Solter, who is accused of approving a defective pipeline and fired from his job, in Günter Stahnke’s 1965 banned DEFA film Der Frühling braucht Zeit. In later films, he was cast as the director of a steel mill, whose management style is criticized by the workers (Lachtauben weinen nicht), or director of a daily paper, who has no problems adjusting to political changes in the country (Der Strass). But, he also played a king in the Grimm’s fairy tale adaptation Von der Gänseprinzessin und ihrem treuen Pferd Falada.

Since the start of his career, Mellies played in various GDR television productions, including Rummmelplatz, the TV adaptation of the Hans-Dieter Mäde Maxim Gorki Theater production of Ewan MacColl’s So Long at the Fair; the TV play Eine amerikanische Hochzeit, based on the accident of the nuclear-powered submarine USS Thresher in 1963; and the crime series Polizeiruf 110.

Mellies’s talent as reciter had been in high demand for GDR state functions and commemorative events. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1977, he participated in Rote Revue: Zehn Tage, die die Welt erschütterten (Red Revue: Ten Days that Shook the World), which was based on the novel by John Reed and took place at the Palast der Republik in Berlin.

Eberhard Mellies, who is the the older brother of actor Otto Mellies, has been involved in audio book projects, record productions, and countless film dubbings. He gave his German voice to many well-known actors, including Jean Marais, Bud Spencer, Jean Gabin, George Baker, Richard Riehle, Terry Lester, Sherman Howard and Ronny Cox.