He was not allowed to be the Prince of Homburg, not Tasso, not Hamlet, in the role of the romantically radiant heroes, the others were always cast.

Instead, Edgar Selge played the difficult, torn, abysmal characters early on: Shakespeare's Iago, Chekhov's Astrow, the chamberlain Marinelli in Lessing's “Emilia Galotti”, the scribe Licht in Kleist's “Broken Krug”, the man in the parka in Botho Strauss' "Big and Small".

In the Werkraumtheater of the Münchner Kammerspiele, to whose ensemble Selge belonged almost twenty years, he had a celebrated solo appearance in 1994 with the Koltès monologue “The Night Short Before the Woods”. In 1997 he tore out fibers from Rilke's “Duineser Elegien” and added them an evening together under the title: "Who, when I screamed, heard me".

Simon Strauss

Editor in the features section.

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Desperation and falling were familiar from an early age, the son of a prison director.

He gained his first theater experience in the theater group of a juvenile detention center.

The tendency to profound roles and his recurring impulse to ennoble even the worst criminals with the privilege of solitude may stem from this.

From the Sauerland via Munich to Berlin

With his distant urgency, this sinewy, almost lean man with the strikingly pointed face succeeds in making all heaviness look feather-light and yet collapsing so fundamentally at the crucial moment that nothing can hold him. Selge achieved the ultimate triumph in this gaming sense in 2016 with his Hamburg monologue version of Houellebecq's dystopia novel "Unterwerfung", in which - clamped into the cross-shaped opening of a black wall - for almost three hours he more conjured up than explained the moral neglect of the present. An evening of physical and mental exertion, for which Selge was rightly awarded the German Theater Prize for best actor.

Originally, Selge, who was born in the Sauerland and grew up in Herford in East Westphalia, studied German and - for ten semesters with Ernesto Grassi - philosophy in Munich, followed by an apprenticeship at the classical piano in Vienna, in order to then switch arts and study at Otto- Falckenberg School in Munich to train as an actor. After his first engagement at the Berlin Schillertheater, he met his most important teacher at the Münchner Kammerspiele with Dieter Dorn, who - according to his own admission - primarily taught him the ability "inner precision", "which always takes into account who you actually are in all situational play itself is ".

When Selge concentrated more on his career as a film and, above all, television actor at the end of the 1980s, there were increasingly fewer opportunities to follow this resolution.

As a staid banker in Helmut Dietl's “Rossini” he had a memorable appearance in the midst of all the lusty pigging people with the sentence “I have a good feeling” (emphasis on “good”), in “Kir Royal” he haughtily served Mario Adorf in the Villa Medici.

Of all the penetrating neighbors, Berlin sauna-goers and paranoid scaredy rabbits that Selge played in the course of his film career, his portrayal of the one-armed inspector Jürgen Tauber in the Bavarian “Polizeiruf 110” remains the most clearly present.

Only rarely at the theater

Selge has been married to his acting colleague Franziska Walser since 1985, with whom he also works again and again.

Just like with his son, Jakob Walser, who also became an actor.

Unfortunately, Edgar Selge only returns to the theater sporadically.

Directed by Jan Bosse, he played Faust (although he would have been better seen as Mephistopheles) and the village judge Adam.

What actually sets Selge apart was not clear.

The implementation of Dorn's dictum should definitely happen on stage again soon - the delicately imagined illness in the world that this actor carries within him is urgently waiting to break out.

Today the soul head Selge is seventy years old.