Klaus Kinski

Kinski's screen career is one of those careers that's hard to map cleanly — over 130 film appearances (Wikipedia) across European and international productions, spanning genres from spaghetti westerns to art-house horror to literary adaptations. That's not a career arc so much as a career flood. He worked constantly, and the sheer volume of output means there's no clean "breakthrough moment" in the traditional sense. The work that defined him, though, came through his partnership with Werner Herzog. Starting with Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972, Kinski delivered a performance as the conquistador Don Lope de Aguirre that remains one of cinema's great portraits of obsession — quiet in some scenes, volcanic in others, always unnerving. Herzog kept coming back. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) cast Kinski as a genuinely tragic Count Dracula, all pale grief and rat-teeth, a reading of the character that felt nothing like what came before it. That same year brought Woyzeck (1979), adapted from Büchner's play. Then Fitzcarraldo in 1982 — a film whose production was reportedly as chaotic as anything on screen — and finally Cobra Verde in 1987, their fifth and final collaboration. Honestly, it's difficult to think of another actor whose best work is so thoroughly tied to a single director, and yet who also worked so prolifically outside that relationship. The Herzog films are the reason people search his name today, but they represent only a fraction of those 130-plus credits. He died in November 1991, and the full shape of that career is still, I'd argue, underexplored by mainstream audiences.