Oskar Werner - Later Career

Later Career

Werner's portrayal of the philosophical Dr. Schumann in the 1965 film Ship of Fools won him the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor. His portrayal of Jewish East German spy Fiedler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) won him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture and his second BAFTA nomination. In 1966, he played book-burning fireman Guy Montag in François Truffaut's film adaptation of the cult-classic Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. He played an orchestra conductor in Interlude and a Vatican priest loosely based on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Shoes of the Fisherman in 1968, the same year he divorced Power.

In the early 1970s, Werner returned to the stage and spent time traveling in Israel, Italy, Malta, France, and the United States. He appeared in an episode of Columbo in 1975, and the following year made his final screen appearance in Voyage of the Damned, for which he received another Golden Globe nomination.

Werner was an alcoholic, which was a deciding factor in the decline of his health and career. His last stage appearance was in a 1983 production of The Prince of Homburg, and he made his last public appearance at the Mozart Hall in Salzburg ten days prior to his death. On 22 October 1984, Werner cancelled a reading at the Hotel Europäischer Hof in Marburg because he was feeling ill. He was found dead of a heart attack the following morning, two days after François Truffaut had died. He is buried in his adopted country of Liechtenstein.