It was inevitable that the German actor Gottfried John, with his gaunt features, low cheekbones, raspy voice and boxer's flattened nose, would play villains. In commercial terms, the culmination of his 20-year stage, cinema and television career came when John was cast as the perfidious Russian general Arkady Ourumov, James Bond's nemesis, in GoldenEye (1995), the highest-earning Bond film since Moonraker, 16 years previously.
However, for cinephiles, it was not the name of Bond with which John, who has died of cancer aged 74, was immediately associated, but that of the German wunderkind director Rainer Werner Fassbinder for whom he appeared in five features, most significantly as the poisonous Reinhold Hoffmann in the 14-part television series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), based on Alfred Döblin's novel.
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