Hans Richter (actor)

Hans Richter made his film debut as "Fliegender Hirsch" in Gerhard Lamprecht's Emil and the Detectives (1931), based on the novel of the same name by Erich Kästner. In the following years, Richter become a popular juvenile actor; often playing clever, somewhat cheeky boys^[1] (a type similar to Mickey Rooney in the American film during the 1930s). When he reached legal age, he had appeared in over 50 films. After his supporting role as a lazy schoolboy in Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944), Richter got drafted into the German Wehrmacht and was also in war imprisonment for some time.

After the World War, Richter worked as a cabaret artist and also appeared in numerous of the popular Heimatfilms, among them The Black Forest Girl (1950) and The Heath Is Green (1951). He also worked as a film director on two films during the 1950s: Vatertag and Hurrah – Die Firma hat ein Kind, both released in 1955. Since the late 1950s, Richter moved more and more to theatre work, making only sparsely film and television appearances during his later years. He appeared at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and the Opern- und Schauspielhaus Frankfurt. In 1974, he founded the Festspiele Heppenheim, a summer theatre, in which he worked as an actor/director/producer until his retirement in the 1990s.

Hans Richter was married to his wife Ingeborg Bieber for 63 years until his death, aged 89. They had two children. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983.^[2]

• John Holmstrom, The Moving Picture Boy: An International Encyclopaedia from 1895 to 1995, Norwich, Michael Russell, 1996, p.90.

• Hans Richter at IMDb