Christoph Waltz

Christoph Waltz (born October 4, 1956, Vienna, Austria) is an Austrian actor known for his gleefully arch comic performances.

Waltz seemed destined for a career in the theatrical arts. His parents were set and costume designers, and some of his grandparents had been actors. He studied at the Max Reinhardt Seminar of the University of Music and Dramatic Art in Vienna and at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City. He made a few appearances in Austrian television movies and a West German TV series in the late 1970s and went on in the succeeding decades to have an astonishingly prolific if low-key career in European film and television; in addition, he regularly performed onstage. By the 1990s Waltz had become a familiar presence on British and Austrian TV crime shows and comedies, with occasional forays onto the big screen. While it was a financially rewarding career, Waltz by his own account found it to be creatively unfulfilling.

All that changed when Waltz auditioned for the part of Col. Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds (2009). Tarantino had begun to despair of finding an actor who could bring life to the role until he heard Waltz, who, for his part, credited Tarantino for reviving his love of acting. The role of the terrifyingly charming killer, the villain of the anti-Nazi revenge story, was perfectly suited to Waltz’s talents, and, though Brad Pitt had the leading role in the movie, it was Waltz’s multifaceted performance that caught the attention of audiences and critics alike. The tour de force garnered him best supporting actor awards at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards, as well as an award for best actor at the Cannes film festival. The breakout role led to parts in other American movies, among them Water for Elephants, The Three Musketeers, and Carnage (all released in 2011).

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Waltz’s second Tarantino collaboration, in Django Unchained (2012), proved just as incendiary as the first. His character—one of the heroes of a revenge fantasy set in the antebellum American South—was complex, troubling, and delightful. Waltz flawlessly inhabited the role of the erudite dentist turned bounty hunter. He again earned best supporting actor awards at the Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTAs. Waltz then starred in director Terry Gilliam’s dystopian science-fiction drama The Zero Theorem (2013). He appeared as the manipulative husband of painter Margaret Keane in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014), as the villain Blofeld (also known as Oberhauser) in the James Bond films Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021), and as Belgian colonist Leon Rom (a historical figure known for his cruelty in the Congo Free State) in the adventure film The Legend of Tarzan (2016).

In 2017 Waltz starred in the historical drama Tulip Fever and in Downsizing, a satire about people who elect to undergo a medical procedure that causes them to shrink. Two years later he appeared in Alita: Battle Angel. Also in 2019 Waltz directed his first feature film, Georgetown, a crime drama in which he starred as a real-life social climber accused of killing his wealthy wife. He later was cast in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Rifkin’s Festival (2020). In 2021 he appeared in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a dramedy about the final edition of a newspaper’s magazine supplement.