Autodidacts' life paths are often winding.

Not so in the case of Erwin Steinhauer, who was born on September 19, 1951 in the 19th district of Sievering in Vienna.

The father at heart is a painter who works for the professional fire brigade, the mother a commercial clerk.

Loving parents who send their son to a less loving Catholic kennel.

He should become a bourgeois, civil servant, academic if possible.

The son's urge to act has to wait, at the request of the father, “Eri” studies German and history, breaks off without a degree after five years, turns to cabaret with his own texts and songs.

Many successful years follow, first with the group “Keif”, then with solo programs, while his career as an actor is picking up speed.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Steinhauer is not squeamish, he throws himself into every challenge, believes in himself.

In 1982 he became a member of the Burgtheater ensemble.

There he played Helmut Qualtinger's monologue “Der Herr Karl” three hundred times.

When he left the castle in 1988, in the eyes of his stunned father, he was closer than ever to official status.

An enormous range

It continues in the theater in der Josefstadt under the directorship of Otto Schenk. Steinhauer directs, plays at the Salzburg Festival, speaks the private detective Brenner in Wolf Haas' crime novels, can be seen in "Tatort", in the series "Traces of Evil", plays with Hannelore Elsner in "The Gambler". But entertainment alone was never enough for the politically wide awake. That has family backgrounds. His Jewish great-grandfather survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and his grandfather told him about the atrocities he experienced on the Isonzo front during World War I.

This shaped Steinhauer deeply and led to the fact that in 1991, at a reading by “evil Austrian authors” in the cabaret Vindobona, he read - unannounced - from Hitler's “Mein Kampf”. Half of the three hundred spectators left the hall in protest. Steinhauer sticks firmly to this enlightening strand of his work to this day. The range of this heavyweight actor is enormous, he can be delicate, quiet and crazy, cold and opaque, quick-tempered and powerful.

He can go home anyway: Steinhauer returned to his Weinviertel roots in the film adaptations of Alfred Komarek's crime novels. The fact that Steinhauer, the father of three children, once named Gene Hackman as an acting role model because of his ability to age gracefully, fits this image of a man, whom one simply likes to watch while pondering. Today Erwin Steinhauer is seventy years old.