“Tatort” actor and voice actor: Jacques Breuer is dead

Many fans of the film series “The Lord of the Rings” know his distinctive voice: The actor and speaker Jacques Breuer has died. “In deepest sadness,” his agency announced that he died peacefully on September 5th “from the effects of a stroke.” The “Bild” newspaper had previously reported. The actor, who was also the German voice of the US actor Viggo Mortensen, was 67 years old.

Breuer became quite well known among German television audiences at a young age through his role as Peter Bathory in the 1979 ZDF series “Mathias Sandorf”, based on the book by Jules Verne. He was also a frequent guest in popular TV crime series such as “Derrick”, “Tatort”, “Polizeiruf 110” and “Hubert ohne Staller”.

At 17, the youngest villain in “Derrick”

In an interview with the radio station Bayern 3 in 2013, Breuer said that after his acting training at the Otto Falckenberg School, he was a kind of “Hans in Luck,” and for a while he was even the youngest member of the Munich Residenztheater. “I was the youngest villain in ‘Derrick’ – at 17 years old.” The industry portal imdb.com lists 80 roles.

His pleasant, rather quiet and almost chalky voice is very distinctive. Viewers know this timbre from the hero Aragorn, played by Viggo Mortensen, in “The Lord of the Rings”, but also from Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane) in the fantasy series “Game of Thrones – A Song of Ice and Fire” and from many minor characters in US crime dramas.

Breuer, who came from an Austrian family of actors, said in an interview that he had never dreamed of doing anything else in his life. As a child, he had watched documentaries about adventurers. “It was my big dream, to go into the jungle with people like that and find some ruins. But then I somehow preferred playing something like that – and as a child, playing the archaeologist who found some Inca treasures. That’s why I was always in a strange world of my own.”