Born: October 29, 1917 in Los Angeles
Died: February 25, 1993 in Wiesbaden

The son of Russian-Polish immigrants, he grew up in Los Angeles and Providence (Rhode Island). At the age of sixteen, he began studying singing at the Vienna Conservatory in order to become an opera singer, following his father's wishes. Two years later, he continued his studies in New York. In 1938, he joined the vocal quintet "The Five Musketeers" as a bass, which performed with entertainers such as Harry James and Frank Sinatra. He also became a choir member of the MGM film studios (Los Angeles) and Radio City Music Hall (New York). There he met the Czech ballet dancer Helinka Musilova in 1941 and married her in the same year.

He returned to Europe with her in 1947, first working as the director of a musical chorus in London, then as a singer in Paris, where he performed at the Moulin Rouge and other venues from 1950. Edith Piaf supported him and helped his career as a chansonnier to take off. With hits such as "Ich wünsch Dir einen schönen Abend" and "Schenk deiner Frau doch hin und wieder rote Rosen", he became known to a wider audience in Germany in 1953.

In the same year, he made his breakthrough as FBI agent Lemmy Caution in the French production "La mome vert-de-gris" ("Under the Spell of the Blonde Satan") and found the role of his life in it. His distinctive head with the pepita hat, his well-toned body and, above all, his tongue-in-cheek mixture of seasoned womanizer and hard-boiled detective made him a cult figure in 1960s cinema. Jean-Luc Godard stylized him from cult to art figure in his 1965 science fiction film "Lemmy Caution vs Alpha 60", which won the "Golden Bear" at the Berlin International Film Festival.

He then increasingly turned into a character actor, working with directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder ("Warning of a Holy Whore"), Ulrike Ottinger ("Freak Orlando") and Lars von Trier ("Europa"), whose performances were inevitably reminiscent of his time as Lemmy Caution (later Nick Carter). He did not shy away from self-parody (as in the TV series "Kottan ermittelt").

From 1979 until his death, he lived in seclusion with his wife from his third marriage and daughter Mia in a classicist villa in Wiesbaden's Kurpark.