Maximilian Schell obituary

Austrian by birth, Swiss by circumstance and international by reputation, Maximilian Schell, who has died aged 83, was a distinguished actor, director, writer and producer. However, he will be best remembered as an actor, especially for his Oscar-winning performance in Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) – an early highlight among scores of television and movie appearances. He also directed opera, worked tirelessly in the theatre and made six feature films, including Marlene (1984) - a tantalising portrait of Dietrich, his co-star in Judgment, who is heard being interviewed but not seen, except in movie extracts.

Schell courted controversy and much of his work, including The Pedestrian (1973), dealt with the second world war, its attendant crimes and the notion of collective guilt. In 1990, when he was offered a special award for his contributions to German film, he refused to accept it.

He was born in Vienna into a comfortable and cultured Roman Catholic home. His mother was an actor, his father a playwright. In 1938 the family fled the Anschluss and settled in Switzerland, where Max attended schools in Basel and Zurich, studying at universities in those cities and subsequently in Munich. He served in the Swiss army and then, aged 22, embarked on a professional acting career; his first appearance had been aged three in one of his father's plays.

Always a darkly handsome figure, with a commanding presence and voice, he initially worked on the stage, but after a couple of fleeting screen appearances took an important supporting role in Kinder, Mütter und ein General (1955). The film attracted international attention, partly because of its director, Laslo Benedek, whose The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, had inspired great controversy, and partly because of its antiwar stance. This and The Girl from Flanders (1956), by the liberal German director Helmut Käutner, and bigger roles in inferior movies, led to Schell's stage debut, alongside Rosemary Harris, in New York in Interlock (1958).

The same year he played a German army captain in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions, opposite Brando. He also took on the role of D'Artagnan in a TV version of the The Three Musketeers.

He returned to Germany to play Hamlet on screen in 1960 then joined the all-star cast of Judgment at Nuremberg, as Hans Rolfe, the defence lawyer. There were fine performances from Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster, among others, but Schell carried off the best actor statuette at the 1961 Oscar ceremony, as well as the New York critics award.

It made an international star of a serious actor and for the next years he found himself torn between conflicting career choices. He accepted, often for commercial reasons, cinema dross such as Krakatoa, East of Java (1969), Players (1979) and The Assisi Underground (1985). The immediate post-Oscar period was the most difficult for him. After The Reluctant Saint (1962) in Italy, he took on the role of the tutor in the filmed version of Five Finger Exercise in the same year. This turned out to be a ludicrous Americanisation of Peter Shaffer's peculiarly English play. He followed it with a confused version of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, glumly directed by Vittorio De Sica.

He was rescued by the caper movie Topkapi (1964), which proved a great hit – unlike the bizarre Return from the Ashes (1965) in which he played a murderous chess master. He took the title role in Simón Bolívar (1969), and became another Nazi in the feeble Counterpoint (1967), where he was in charge of a concentration camp housing a symphony orchestra conducted by Charlton Heston. These and other films were what helped pay the bills on his own production of Franz Kafka's The Castle (1968), in which he starred as K. Approaching 40, he was anxious to make movies rather than act in them.

In the 1960s he directed operas, including La Traviata, and plays including Hamlet and Pygmalion. In 1969 he came to Britain to work for Peter Hall at the National Theatre, directing Tales from the Vienna Woods. Years later he adapted and produced this work for the screen. By 1970 he felt, in his own words, that he had managed "to start again" after the Oscar and directed First Love, which he co-adapted from Turgenev's story. He also acted in it as the father – part of a formidable international cast. It was screened at the National Film theatre and Schell himself impressed during a lecture-discussion, revealing his intelligence and charm, but despite good reviews and a major award at the San Sebastián film festival it received only limited release.

He subsequently directed The Pedestrian, from his original screenplay about a wealthy industrialist unmasked as a Nazi officer responsible for wartime atrocities. Hall and a scene in which four acting legends – Peggy Ashcroft, Lil Dagover, Elisabeth Bergner and Françoise Rosay – take tea together enlivened a solid German cast.

The following year he acted with his sister Maria in The Odessa File, once again playing a concentration-camp commander. He had a more substantial role in The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), portraying a wealthy New Yorker kidnapped and taken to Israel for trial as a war criminal. It gained him an Oscar nomination, as did his role in Julia (1977), directed by Fred Zinnemann. Oddly, between these two prestige movies he took a feeble role in a Charles Bronson movie, St Ives (1976).

This was redeemed by his role as an army captain in Sam Peckinpah's characteristically violent Cross of Iron (1977). He was in service again, promoted to lieutenant general, in Attenborough's epic A Bridge Too Far (1977) and managed to establish a character despite being marooned in a sea of familiar faces.

Through the next decades he worked in Europe (maintaining homes in Munich and Switzerland) and in America, where he appeared in a Disney adventure, The Black Hole (1979), a television reworking of The Diary of Anne Frank (as the father) and an uninspired version of The Phantom of the Opera (1983). The following year he set up the biopic Marlene. At the last moment his star decided against being photographed. Intriguingly Schell reconstructed her Paris flat as a ghostly backdrop to his interviews with her. The film was well received at the Berlin Film Festival, but it proved too esoteric for the commercial market. His US television movie Candles in the Dark (1993) was a different proposition. A family-oriented film, it starred his wife, Natalya Andreychenko, a Russian actor he had married in 1985. The couple also appeared together in the mini-series Peter the Great (1986), for which Schell received much acclaim for his performance in the title role, and in Little Odessa (1994), in which he played the alienated father of Soviet hit-man Tim Roth.

During the 90s he had much screen work, including a cameo opposite Brando in The Freshman and the role of Lenin in the television drama Stalin (1992), which won him a Golden Globe as best supporting actor. Horror movies were offered. In 1998, in the bible-based shocker The Eighteenth Angel he was an evil priest, while in Vampires he was upgraded to cardinal. He was a member of the church again in a television revamp of Joan of Arc (1999). Among many other European films, were the earnest second world war movie Left Luggage (1998) and On the Wings of Love (1999). The disaster movie Deep Impact (1998) reunited him with a regular acting partner, Vanessa Redgrave.

In 2000 he was one of several participants in Festival in Cannes, a portrait of the loonier aspect of the movie business, shot on location by Henry Jaglom. Later that year he attended the Baltic Pearl film festival in Latvia to receive the actor of the millennium award; while there he collapsed with acute pancreatitis. A reduction of his schedule followed, but could never detract from one of the most formidable acting and directing careers of the postwar years.

He kept on working, mostly in tele-vision. He appeared in Best Seller (2002), an Austro-German co-production, and All the Luck in the World (2003); in the series Giants (2007) he took the role of Albert Einstein; and between 2003 and 2007 he appeared in 34 episodes of the television series Der Fürst und das Mädchen.

In his tirelessly international style he co-starred in Coast to Coast (2003), adapted by Frederic Raphael from his own novel and directed by Paul Mazursky. Three years later in The Shell Seekers, filmed in Cornwall and directed by Piers Haggard, he was reunited with Redgrave. In the US he appeared in the comedy The Brothers Bloom (2008), in Spain in the thriller Black Flowers (2009) and in the Czech Republic in the sadly undistinguished horror film Darkness.

He and Andreychenko were divorced in 2005. Last year he married the German-Croatian opera singer Iva Mihanovic; she and his daughter by his first marriage, Nastassja, survive him.