Farewell to Mario Adorf, the Luca Canali of "La mala ordina"

Mario Adorf has passed away in Paris. He was 95 years old and had been ill for a few days. Considered among the most beloved actors in Germany, but appreciated just about everywhere for his great talent, the news was leaked by his longtime manager Michael Stark to the weekly “Der Spiegel” and later confirmed to the German agency Dpa. He was born in Zurich on September 8, 1930. His mother, Alice Adorf, was a German nurse, while his father, Calabrian surgeon Matteo Menniti, was already married.

One of the most famous faces in German-speaking cinema, also appreciated abroad, Adorf has participated in more than 200 productions between the big and small screen. In his long career he has worked with such leading directors as Sam Peckinpah, Dario Argento, Luigi Comencini, Carlo Mazzacurati, Franco Rossi, Wolfgang Staudte, Edgar Reitz, Billy Wilder, Volker Schlöndorff, Helmut Dietl, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Claude Chabrol and Sergio Corbucci. In Italy he took part in Luigi Comencini’s “A cavallo della tigre” (1961) and Fernando Di Leo’s “Milano Calibro 9” (1971) and “La mala ordina” (1972), among others.

Notoriety came in 1957, when he played a serial killer in Robert Siodmak’s “Secret Order of the Third Reich.” Thereafter he was often cast in antagonist parts. He also obtained important roles in film adaptations of literary works, such as Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum” (1979), based on the novel by Günter Grass, and “The Katharina Blum Case” (1975), directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, based on the book “The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum” by Heinrich Böll. In 2016 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.