Versatile actor at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre who made films with Wim Wenders and Eric Rohmer
The German actor Otto Sander, who has died aged 72 after suffering from cancer, made his name as one of the members of Peter Stein's Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, where he developed a versatile but precise stage presence that he brought to all kinds of roles. Sander also had more than 100 credits in film and TV productions, most notably Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), as a drunk and disillusioned U-boat captain, and Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), as one of the two angels in Wim Wenders's magical survey of the divided city.
Born in Hanover, Sander grew up in Kassel, where he graduated from the Friederichsgymnasium in 1961. He did his military service as a naval reserve officer. In 1965, in his first engagement at the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele, he showed a natural gift for comedy; he had no lines in Václav Havel's The Garden Party, but with thick glasses and skilfully mimed myopia he brought the house down. The great stage actor Bernhard Minetti pronounced Sander a fine character actor in the making.
He moved on to Heidelberg Stadttheater, where he was a memorable Malvolio in Twelfth Night, struggling visibly with itchy cross-gartered stockings as he performed a series of athletic gags on a steep staircase. From Heidelberg he moved to the Freie Volksbühne, where in 1968 he made his West Berlin breakthrough as a four-year-old in rompers and suspenders in a Philippe Adrien farce. By 1969 Sander, with his sloping shoulders and his air of melancholy as Benedick in a pop version of Much Ado About Nothing, was emerging as a new type of actor for the changing social climate in Germany.
In its first post-Nazi phase, the West German theatre had cultivated symbolism, rhetoric and artifice. In the 1970s a new generation, notably directors such as Stein, Peter Zadek and Claus Peymann took over and, in their different ways, cultivated a style that was realistic, uncompromising and sometimes irreverent. Sander was recruited at this transitional stage by Stein for the new Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer in Berlin, which in the 1970s and 80s was to supersede the Berliner Ensemble as the flagship of German theatre.
For Stein's intensively researched productions, Sander sailed round Greece, gathering background material with the company for the Antiquity Project (1974) for which he appeared as Tiresias in The Bacchae, plastered from head to foot in clay. He immersed himself in the Elizabethan world for Shakespeare's Memory (1976) and As You Like It (1977), and absorbed Russian atmosphere with the company on a trip to the Soviet Union for Chekhov's The Three Sisters (1984), in which he gave a subtle and complex performance as Vershinin, part charmer, part embittered failure. He changed Colonel Kottwitz in Heinrich von Kleist's The Prince of Homburg from a Prussian colonel into a gruff Brandenburg sergeant-major.
Sander was an ideal interpreter of Botho Strauss, the house dramatist at the Schaubühne, whose plays anatomised West German society in the Wirtschaftswunder – economic miracle – years. In Strauss's Trilogy of Reunions (1980) he was a down-to-earth printer doggedly fighting his blue-collar corner in an art club full of bourgeois snobs. "These people are us," he told me at the time. His hilarious struggle with the domestic appliances in Kalldewey Farce, when his wife has left to join the feminists, or his dishevelling efforts to extract gladioli from their cellophane wrapping in Final Chorus were two of many tours de force in Strauss's plays.
His Tati-esque mastery of serious slapstick was unique in recent German theatre. In the beginning the Schaubühne was organised on democratic lines, with all decisions made by the entire staff. In the early years Sander tried repeatedly in the plenary discussions to have a comedy included in the classical repertoire, eventually succeeding with Seán O'Casey's The End of the Beginning in 1975.
Sander's range was considerable. He won the player of the year award in 1979 for his part in Robert Wilson's five-and-a-half-hour Death, Destruction and Detroit, a plot-free collage of exquisitely composed stage images. Sander proved to be perfectly at home with Wilson's technique of giving the performer total freedom while containing him within the director's aesthetic vision.
His dazzling swansong at the Schaubühne, after 25 years, was as a suave ladykiller in Sacha Guitry's Faisons un Rêve, directed by Luc Bondy. In the UK, he was seen at the National Theatre in London when the Schaubühne brought over Gorky's Summerfolk in 1977 and as Claudius in Zadek's production of Hamlet at the Edinburgh festival in 2000.
His film appearances ranged from shoestring shorts by young film-makers who caught his imagination to elegant literary films such as Eric Rohmer's 1976 version of Kleist's The Marquise of O and Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 film of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. In Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg (1986) he played Karl Liebknecht, with whom Luxemburg co-founded the Spartacus League. He reunited with Wenders and his co-star Bruno Ganz for In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (Faraway, So Close!), a 1993 sequel to Wings of Desire. In 2000 he joined Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich and Jeanne Moreau in a TV adaptation of Les Misérables.
Sander was, like his idol from the Weimar Republic, Curt Bois, an accomplished Kabarettist, performing in the Bar Jeder Vernunft, a hot venue in a Spiegeltent off the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Appearing on the German TV series Tatort (Crime Scene) as a tramp, he extracted a grand banquet from the police in return for essential evidence in a murder case. In this supporting role he gave a mesmerising cameo of a gourmet fallen on hard times, a mouth-watering celebration of gustatory delight.
His warm, strong tones earned him the nickname "The Voice" and he was used frequently as narrator for television documentaries, and many talking books in the 1990s.
Sander is survived by his wife, the actor Monika Hansen, and his stepchildren, Ben and Meret Becker, who are also actors.
• Otto Sander, actor, born 30 June 1941; died 12 September 2013
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