Thure Riefenstein


Thure Riefenstein is a German actor, director, writer and producer.

Personal life

Riefenstein was born in Germany of Austrian and Serbian descent. He speaks German, English, French and Spanish.

Career

Thure Riefenstein graduated in 1989 from acting school in Germany, worked for five years on stage in Berlin and continued studying acting and film in New York and Los Angeles. He since has been working internationally for cinema, television and theater in the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Czech Republic, Sweden, Serbia, Morocco and Turkey.
His notable films include the US-Canadian feature Sophie, with John Rhys-Davies and Deborah Kara Unger. In the Golden Czech Lion Award winning WW2 drama Dark Blue World, he played for director and Academy Award Winner Jan Sverák and in the action thriller Hostile Takeover, he worked with director Carl Schenkel. In the US-German feature Baltic Storm, he took a leading part alongside Greta Scacchi, Jürgen Prochnow, and Donald Sutherland. In 2012, he worked with Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh in Behind the Candelabra and acted alongside Michael Douglas, Matt Damon and Dan Aykroyd. He played August in the feature Willie and Me, starring country icon Willie Nelson, and in 2018, he finished shooting the part of the Captain in the epic WW2 movie Torpedo, aka U-235.
Riefenstein's acclaimed TV work includes the French period movie Julie, chevalier de Maupin, where he starred with Marisa Berenson, Pierre Arditi and Gottfried John and which garnered an 'International Emmy Award' nomination for best foreign film. The TV series Kommissarin Lucas, with Thure Riefenstein as the male leading detective, received the highly acclaimed German Adolf Grimme Award nomination for Best Film. In the film he was nominated for Best Lead Male Actor and was also a semi finalist for the International Emmy Award in 2010 in the same category. He guest starred in the American series Leverage with Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton and also in The Brink where he acted alongside Academy Award winner Tim Robbins. In the Syfy series 12 Monkeys, he guest starred as SS-Sturmbannführer Waesch in the episode Die Glocke alongside Barbara Sukowa and Amanda Shull.
He also starred in the European action drama mini-series The Crusaders, with Armin Mueller-Stahl and Franco Nero, the successful feature comedy 666: In Bed with the Devil, the Canadian film Criminal Instinct with Victor Garber or in the science fiction feature Ainoa.
Riefenstein is a trained theater actor and has performed theatrical plays such as Shakespeare's Pericles, Brecht's Life of Galileo, Walter Jens's The Downfall, Ariane Mnouchkine's Mephisto and also in musicals such as Linie 1 or the revue The Blue Angel where he played with Ute Lemper at the Theater des Westens in Berlin and the Hamburger Schauspielhaus. The legendary show was directed by European theater icons Peter Zadek and Jérôme Savary. Riefenstein also worked with Bertolt Brecht's former assistant Peter Palitzsch on Pericles at the Berliner Ensemble and with Vlad Mugur on Carlo Goldoni's The Liar. His latest theatre work was in Captain Greedy's Carnival, a production of Tim Robbins' Actors Gang.
He lived in London to practice working in fringe theatre and in New York to work with Kristin Linklater. His American debut was in the New York production of Jean Genet's The Maids for the Berkshire Theatre Festival. In Los Angeles, he studied acting at the ACI based on Lee Strasberg's and Sandford Meisner's working techniques and worked with several coaches such as Doug Warhit, Sam Christensen, Bruce Davison and Michelle Danner. He trained at the Actors Gang in Culver City with Cynthia Ettinger and Tim Robbins, where he worked as an associate member for a year.
Riefenstein is also a director, producer and writer for the movie industry.
His voice over work includes Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and the Wolfenstein sequels The New Collossus and The New Order.
He is married to author Patricia Lueger and has a son named Paris Aaron Lazar Riefenstein born in 2003.

Awards

His distinctions as an actor include a Bambi Audience Award and an International Emmy Award nomination in 2010 and 2009 for Boeseckendorf - The Night a Village Vanished,
an Adolf Grimme Award nomination for Best Film in 2007 for Kommissarin Lukas, an International Emmy Award nomination for Best Mini-Series in 2005 for Julie, chevalier du Maupin. As a director, he received the German Film Classification Board rating of "highly valuable movie" for God Is No Soprano in 2003 and in 1995 for Lonely Nights.

Partial filmography