Hardy Krüger is dead. The actor and writer died in California on Wednesday at the age of 93, as his agency announced on Thursday in Hamburg.

"His warmth of heart, his joie de vivre and his unshakable sense of justice will make him unforgettable," it said.

The native of Berlin, who lived in California and Hamburg for a long time, played the leading role in around 75 films.

After the war he was one of the few German actors to have an international career.

Krüger made his breakthrough outside of Germany in the British war film One Came Through.

He starred opposite John Wayne in Hatari!, along with James Stewart and Peter Finch in Flight of the Phoenix.

In 1963, the French drama film "Sundays with Sybill" received an Oscar - Krüger played a Vietnam veteran who blames himself for the death of a Vietnamese child.

The actor himself has received various awards over the course of his career, including the Federal Film Prize and the Grand Cross of Merit.

He was the "Globetrotter"

Krüger was in front of the camera with stars like Claudia Cardinale, Sean Connery, Yul Brynner, Charles Aznavour, Cathérine Deneuve and Orson Welles. On television, he created a classic as a “globetrotter” in the ARD series of the same name. With his book "A Farm in Africa" ​​Krüger also started a career as a writer.

Hardy (actually Franz Eberhard August) Krüger was born on April 12, 1928 to Max Krüger, an engineer, and his wife Auguste in Berlin-Wedding.

The family had another daughter Ilse.

Because of his parents' enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler, Hardy Krüger came to the Ordensburg in Sonthofen, an elite National Socialist boarding school, which he felt tortured to attend.

At the age of 13 he learned to fly a glider there.

At the age of 15 he was discovered by the Ufa director Alfred Weidenmann for the film "Junge Adler" (1943).

In the course of filming, Krüger became friends with the much older actor Hans Söhnker, who hid Jews in his country house and made it possible for them to flee to Switzerland.

Almost sentenced to death

Söhnker became Krüger's mentor, told him about the concentration camps and accepted him as a courier in the group of his escape helpers.

In 1945, Hardy Krüger was sent to the front in Tyrol as a Panzergrenadier in the “Nibelungen” division and was almost sentenced to death “for failing to carry out an ordered combat operation”.

However, he managed to escape to the mountains and return to Berlin.

As a member of the NSDAP (and because of his work as a locomotive designer), his father was interned in a Soviet camp towards the end of the war, where he died a short time later.

After the war, Hardy Krüger took his mother from the Soviet zone to relatives in the American zone.