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Anton Diffring

Anton Diffring built a screen career around a presence filmmakers knew how to use: fair-haired, pale-eyed and sharply featured, he was repeatedly cast as a German officer in the wave of British Second World War productions made from the 1950s onward. Those roles became a defining thread, but they were never the whole story. Born Alfred Pollack in Koblenz on 19 October 1916, Diffring studied acting in Berlin and Vienna before establishing himself in England. He became fluent in English and worked for a time as an interpreter at the War Office. After two fleeting, uncredited film appearances in 1940, his acting career began to gather momentum in 1950. Diffring appeared as German characters in Albert R.N., The Colditz Story, The Heroes of Telemark, The Blue Max, Where Eagles Dare and Zeppelin. He played SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Daybreak, a football commentator in Escape to Victory and Joachim von Ribbentrop in the miniseries The Winds of War. Other wartime parts showed a broader range: he was a Polish parachutist in The Red Beret and a British SAS officer in the Italian production Uccidete Rommel. Away from military dramas, Diffring found particularly strong territory in horror. He starred in The Man Who Could Cheat Death and Circus of Horrors, and led the television pilot Tales of Frankenstein. His international work also included François Truffaut’s English-language Fahrenheit 451. Television brought further variety through Flambards, while the stage gave him the title role in the short-lived 1958 musical Mister Venus opposite Frankie Howerd. Diffring’s final performance returned him to the kind of casting that had followed him for decades: he played another Nazi officer in the 1988 Doctor Who serial Silver Nemesis. He died in 1989, leaving a body of film and television work shaped by his distinctive appearance, controlled screen manner and ability to give authority to characters on either side of the conflict.