Actor Uwe Kockisch dies at the age of 81

In the role of Commissario Brunetti, who is investigating in Venice Kockisch followed Joachim Król (68) in 2003), who had previously played the character. Kockisch then played the inspector until at the end of the 2019 television series. In the ARD crime series based on the novels of the same name by the writer Donna Leon (83), Kockisch investigated in the impressively staged setting of the lagoon city of Venice.

The crime series was very popular with German television audiences. In the last Brunetti case, “Donna Leon – Stille Wasser” was broadcast on Christmas Day 2019 Despite competition from the “Helene Fischer Show”, which ran parallel on ZDF, it still had 5.72 million viewers the crime thriller in the first (18.8 percent).

Kockisch attempted to escape from the GDR

Kockisch also starred in the television series “Weissensee” about the story of an East Berlin family, the Stasi man Hans Kupfer. The 24 episodes of the saga – first broadcast between 2010 and 2018 – also ran on the first.

In real life, Kockisch – born on January 31, 1944 in Cottbus – tried to escape from the GDR as a teenager. For this he had to go to prison for a time. He trained at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts and played at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin for around two decades.