“Commissario Brunetti” is dead – Uwe Kockisch died at the age of 81

The one as “Commissario Brunetti” from the ARD crime series Donna Leon Well-known actor Uwe Kockisch is dead. He died on Monday at the age of 81 in Madrid, as his agency confirmed to the German Press Agency, citing his wife. Previously it had Young world reported.

In the role of Brunetti, who is investigating in Venice, Kockisch succeeded Joachim Król (68), who had previously played the character, in 2003. Kockisch then played the inspector until the end of the television series in 2019. In this ARD 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.

The crime dramas were very popular with German television audiences. In the last Brunetti case, “Donna Leon – Stille Wasser” on Christmas Day 2019, despite competition from the “Helene Fischer Show”, which ran parallel on ZDF, at least 5.72 million viewers tuned in to Das Erste (18.8 percent).

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

Time in prison made him “mature very quickly”

In real life, Kockisch, who was born in Cottbus on January 31, 1944, tried to flee 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.

In an interview with the Berlin morning post He said that his time in prison had made him ten years more mature. “It was like a constant state of shock for me. You just do what you’re told and keep your mouth shut. You’re no longer a subject, you’re an object, you can no longer make decisions for yourself. That made me mature very quickly.” However, it was not traumatic for him: “It no longer affects me today.”

The Bild He said in 2023 that he lived in Madrid because he met his wife there. When it gets grayer and grayer in Berlin from November onwards, he thinks it’s really nice that the sun is shining outside in Spain.