Raimund Harmstorf

A tall, athletic bear of a man, Raimund Harmstorf rose to stardom on the strength of a single role: the amoral, brutal, self-righteous captain Wolf Larsen (a Nietzschean 'superman', if there ever was one) in Jack London's The Seawolf (1971). Harmstorf's was a genuinely chilling, mesmerizing performance, which captivated audiences and contributed to this German/Austrian/French/Romanian co-production (with a nominal American-born lead) to be sold to numerous countries worldwide. The role not only defined his career but led to various myths about the actor himself. The most famous of these related to Larsen/Harmstorf squashing a raw potato with one hand, by all accounts not an easy thing to do. Detractors claimed the potato had been a cooked one, which it almost certainly was. Nonetheless, Harmstorf proved in subsequent appearances on national television that he was more than capable of pulverizing a raw spud with one paw. A publicity stunt had him issuing forth a nationwide challenge (with prize money offered) for anyone capable of emulating his feat. Raimund Harmstorf grew up in Hamburg where he studied medicine and then attended the local college for music and the performing arts. He made the rounds of auditions for plays with modest success, leading to engagements in Hamburg and Berlin. He spent two years in South America cultivating his image as a macho adventurer, returning to Germany with two Deutschmarks in his pocket. A lover of action sports (paragliding, surfing and fast cars), he was also an accomplished athlete (in a 1972 issue of 'Bravo' magazine, he claimed to have been a regional decathlon youth champion). By the mid-1960's, he started to establish himself on screen, initially in small TV roles. After 'Wolf Larsen' put him on the map, he had further success in the title role of Jules Verne's Michel Strogoff (1975) and as the vernacular protagonist of Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1979) (a role, he also played on the stage). He also made appearances in several spaghetti westerns along with such genre favorites as Franco Nero and Terence Hill. By the early 1990's, Harmstorf's life as an action hero began to unravel. He had sustained numerous sporting injuries (broken arms and legs, a hole in his knee after a botched operation), lost two teeth in a screen fight with Bud Spencer and was (during shooting of the same film) accidentally shot in the foot. His restaurant, "Zum Seewolf", had gone bankrupt. In 1994, Harmstorf was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. He unwisely self-medicated to the extent of causing severe side effects, including bouts of paranoia and depression. Scurrilous tabloids reported on the minutiae of his psychiatric condition and one even published a premature report of his suicide. What was left of Harmstorf's fragile state of mind broke and he hanged himself on the night of May 3 1998.