Biography:

Arno Paulsen was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) on January 3, 1900. After graduating from school, he took voice lessons with opera singer Wilhelm Bültermann. Starting in 1917, he sung as a choir singer and later as a tenor at the Stadttheater Stettin. He also played in theaters in Hanover and Hamburg. From 1941 to 1943, he performed in theater companies which entertained German troops.

After the war, in 1945, Paulsen joined the Metropol Theater in Berlin and performed mainly in operettas. Film director Wolfgang Staudte first saw him in 1946 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, where he played a guest role as a local Nazi group leader in the satirical musical revue Höllenparade. Staudte cast him as Captain Brückner for the rubble film Die Mörder sind unter uns. As Captain Brückner, Paulsen plays a controversial character who is responsible for killing civilians during WWII, but quickly finds a new fortune as a company owner in postwar Berlin. This successful film debut was the beginning of Paulsen’s two-decade film career, during which he appeared in over 60 films. From 1946 to 1952, he played in movies produced by the East German DEFA Studio for Feature Films, including Georg C. Claren’s Wozzeck film adaptation and Wolfgang Staudte’s comedy, Die seltsamen Abenteuer des Herrn Fridolin B.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Paulsen settled in the West and continued working in film. He shared the screen with renowned West German actors of the 1950s-60s, including Mario Adorf, Gert Fröbe, Paul Hörbiger, Theo Lingen and Hans Moser. Paulsen was cast in Das Mädchen Rosemarie (dir. Rolf Thiele), which won the 1959 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 1958 Venice Film Festival.

Parallel to his work in film, Paulsen frequently played at theaters and dubbed foreign films. For many years, he was the German voice for Oliver Hardy, as Ollie in the American television series Laurel & Hardy.

Arno Paulsen died in Baden-Baden on September 17, 1969.