Wolfgang Preiss actor: born Nuremberg Germany 24 February 1910 died B? Germany 27 November 2002

Wolfgang Preiss, actor: born Nuremberg, Germany 24 February 1910; died B? Germany 27 November 2002. After going mad at the conclusion of the first film, the doctor dies during the Testament in a lunatic asylum.When Lang was invited by the producer Artur Brauner to revive the character, Preiss actually played the role of a disciple of the late doctor, one Dr Jordan, following in Mabuse’s nihilistic footsteps with the help of television cameras and one-way mirrors monitoring the guests in a luxurious Berlin hotel (the “Thousand Eyes” of the title), with the ultimate goal of holding the world to ransom with atomic weapons of mass destruction. In league with Jordan is Cornelius, a blind clairvoyant played by Lupo Prezzo. At the climax Cornelius turns out to be Jordan and “Prezzo” turns out to have been Preiss (Lang hadn’t wanted the cast list giving the game away before viewers had even seen the film). The deception was sufficiently successful for the captions of stills from the film depicting Preiss as Cornelius to continue identifying the actor as Prezzo years later.The film did well and Brauner was keen to make more, but Lang wasn’t interested and the franchise was handed over to other directors. Preiss returned, now, playing the Doctor himself, in Harald Reinl’s Im Stahlnetz des Dr Mabuse (In the Steel Net of Dr Mabuse, 1961), the first of five sequels which included a remake of the original Das Testament by Werner Klingler in 1962 (The Last Will of Dr Mabuse) and ended with Hugo Fregonese’s Die Todesstrahlen des Dr Mabuse (The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse, 1964), the doctor employing picturesque weapons like invisibility and mind-control beams in furtherance of a variety of megalomaniac schemes.Preiss himself was by now, starting with The Counterfeit Traitor (1962), appearing regularly in international English-language co-productions, usually playing junior German officers in war movies. The tall, distinguished-looking actor had been playing military roles on screen since Der Grosse Liebe (The Great Love, 1942), a musical vehicle for Zarah Leander in which he played a young lieutenant.

Last year he recalled for a television documentary that the need for chorus girls of uniform height as tall and statuesque as Leander led to members of Hitler’s ?te SS bodyguard being roped in to appear in a lavish musical number dressed as showgirls. Preiss at one point came across them changing, and, at the sight of his uniform, They all snapped to attention, some in women’s clothes, some with their wigs askew or half made-up, others in their underpants. It was a grotesque sight.Returning to films in the mid-1950s, he was awarded the 1956 Bundesfilmpreis for his performance in Falk Harnack’s account of the 1944 assassination plot, Der 20. Juli (The Plot to Assassinate Hitler, 1955), in which Preiss was Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who placed a bomb in a briefcase at Hitler’s feet. The part was characteristic of Preiss’s subsequent officer roles, who rather than bellowing Nazis were usually thoughtful and sympathetic, such as his hospitable chess-loving Rommel in Henry Hathaway’s Raid on Rommel (1971).Other war films in which he featured included Frank Wysbar’s Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben (Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?, 1958), which recreated from the German point of view the catastrophe of Stalingrad, The Longest Day (1962), John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), Von Ryan’s Express (1965), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Anzio (as Kesselring, 1968), A Bridge Too Far (as von Rundstedt, 1977).

and Gerald Thomas’s The Second Victory (1986).In The Boys from Brazil (1978), he was an elderly ex-Nazi in a storyline that managed to combine elements of both his Mabuse and his war films, in which the former SS doctor Josef Mengele (played by Gregory Peck) presides over an extravagantly daft conspiracy to resurrect the Third Reich by cloning lots of little Hitlers across Europe.Richard Chatten. When, in 1998, in partnership with Irving Gordon, Boris Schapiro won the senior pairs at the World Bridge Championships in Lille, he became the oldest world champion at any sport He was 89. It was 66 years earlier, in 1932, that he won his first Contract Bridge World title – the World Pairs Championship, partnering Oswald Jacoby of the United States. His first major tournament was in 1929, when he partnered Jacoby in the World Auction Bridge Pairs World Championship.

Boris Schapiro, bridge player: born Riga, Latvia 9 August 1909; married 1935 Genia Slutzkin (marriage dissolved 1967), 1969 Helen Johnson; died Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire 1 December 2002. He had arrived in England when he was 10, at the same age learning to play bridge by watching his father. He played chess too, but bridge became his overriding passion.Boris Schapiro was born in Riga, Latvia, the son of Jewish parents, a Russian-speaking father and German-speaking mother, on 9 August 1909; though he celebrated his birthday on 22 August, due to the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in Russia in 1917 In 1912 the family moved to St Petersburg. There Boris attended Madame Bombeck’s kindergarten – setting off daily in his little carriage, clutching his caviare sandwiches – and learnt to speak French (so he was brought up tri-lingual).