Horst Buchholz ✝

Horst Werner Buchholz (4 December 1933 – 3 March 2003) was a German actor who appeared in more than 60 feature films from 1951 to 2002. During his youth, he was sometimes called "the German James Dean". He is perhaps best known in English-speaking countries for his role as Chico in The Magnificent Seven (1960), as a communist in Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961), and as Dr. Lessing in Life Is Beautiful (1997). Horst Buchholz was born in Berlin, the son of Maria Hasenkamp. He never knew his biological father, but took the surname of his stepfather Hugo Buchholz, a shoemaker, whom his mother married in 1938.[better source needed] His half-sister Heidi, born in 1941, gave him the nickname Hotte, which he kept for the rest of his life. During World War II, he was evacuated to Silesia, and at the end of the war, he found himself in a foster home in Czechoslovakia. He returned to Berlin as soon as he could.