A couple of foreign obituaries

German actor Götz George died last week at the age of 77, but his death was only made public within the past day or two. George was mostly known in the German-speaking countries, but one movie that I saw him in ages ago and have been wanting to see again ever since is Schtonk!, a fictionalization of the infamous Hitler Diaries scandal of the early 80s, when a fraudster produced what he claimed were Hitler's diaries, and sold the publication rights to one of Germany's most popular magazines. George plays the journalist in Schtonk! I don't think it's ever been released to DVD in North America, even though it was Oscar-nominated in the Best Foreign Language film category.

For those who can read Italian, you can read about the passing of Bud Spencer, who died today aged 86. Spencer was Italian, so that's obviously a stage name, taken from Budweiser beer and Spencer Tracy. Spencer appeared in several spaghetti westerns in the late 1960s and 1970s that apparently have cult status amongst a certain segment of film fandom; I've never been quite so big a fan of the spaghetti westerns or the more low-brow Italian cinema of the 1960s, so I don't know that much about Spencer myself.