Rest in Peace: Oscar Winner and Former Phantom of the Opera Maximilian Schell

Steve Barton   |  

Feb 1, 2014

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One of the greats has left us, and we’d be remiss to not mention the passing of Oscar winner Maximilian Schell this morning (Feb. 1, 2014) at the age of 83 in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria. He didn’t dabble in the horror genre often, but when he did, it was memorable.

Per the AP via ABC News, Schell’s agent, Patricia Baumbauer, said Saturday he died overnight at a hospital in the Austrian city of Innsbruck following a “sudden illness.”

Austrian-born Schell won his Best Actor Oscar in 1962 for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and also appeared in such genre fare as Deep Impact, The Black Hole, John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Vampyre Wars, Darkness, House of the Sleeping Beauties, The Eighteenth Angel, and 1983 TV movie “The Phantom of the Opera,” in which he played The Phantom opposite Jane Seymour and Michael York.

Despite being type-cast for numerous Nazi-era films, Schell’s acting performances in the mid-1970s won him renewed popular acclaim, earning him a Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Man in the Glass Booth and a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his performance alongside Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Robards in Julia. Schell later worked as a producer, starting with an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” and as a director. In 1992 he received a Golden Globe for his supporting role as Lenin alongside Robert Duvall in the 1992 HBO miniseries “Stalin.”

Schell was also a highly successful concert pianist and conductor, performing with such luminaries as Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna.

We here at Dread Central would like to take a moment to honor Maximilian Schell and offer our condolences to his many friends, family members, and constituents. Thanks for the memories and auf wiedersehen.

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