Pierre Brice

Vocation

French actor, best-known as fictional Apache-chief Winnetou in German Karl May films. When he was 19, Brice enlisted in the French Army and fought in the First Indochina War. While patrolling in Indochina, one of his team triggered a mine and its explosion sent Brice whirling through the air, but left him virtually unhurt. Later he served as a paratrooper during the Algerian War. From 1962 to 1968 he acted in a total of eleven West German Western movies adapted from novels by German author Karl May, in which he played the fictional Indian chief Winnetou of the Mescalero Apache tribe, alongside Lex Barker (7 movies), Stewart Granger (3 movies) and Rod Cameron (1 movie) as the white heroes. After the films he also played this role at the Karl May Festspiele in Elspe from 1977 to 1980 and 1982 to 1986 and at the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg open-air theatre, Germany, from 1988 to 1991. Besides theatre productions, he was mainly seen in TV-series, including Ein Schloß am Wörthersee (A Castle by the Woerthersee) and Die Hütte am See (The Cottage by the Lake). In 1979 Brice again played Winnetou in a 14-part TV series called Mein Freund Winnetou (My friend Winnetou – Winnetou le Mescalero), which did not originate from Karl May material. In 1997 he appeared in a two-part TV mini series Winnetous Rückkehr (de) (The Return of Winnetou), which earned devastating criticism from the fans, since the character had died in the movie Winnetou III and now suddenly returned to life. Again, this did not originate from writings by Karl May. Brice tried to escape the Winnetou character in a 1976 TV series, Star Maidens, and in several movies for the big screen, playing Zorro in the Italian Zorro contro Maciste (1963). He also worked with Terence Hill (still called Mario Girotti at the time) in Schüsse im Dreivierteltakt (Shots in 3/4 Time) (1965), with Lex Barker in a non-Karl May film Die Hölle von Manitoba (de) (A Place Called Glory City) (1965) and in the anthology Gern hab' ich die Frauen gekillt (Killer's Carnival) (1966).[citation needed] Death Pierre Brice died of pneumonia on 6 June 2015 in a Paris hospital. Link to Wikipedia biography