Pierre Brice

The Soldier Who Fled the War

Pierre Louis Le Bris walked the streets of Brest without suspecting that he would become the most famous Indian in Central Europe. Before becoming an actor, he was a soldier and paratrooper in the Indochina War. He survived two landmine explosions and returned to France with his body covered in scars but with his gaze intact.

After the war, he tried to make it as a model in Paris and as a supporting actor in minor productions. But fate was waiting for him at a restaurant during the 1962 Berlin Film Festival. Producer Horst Wendlandt saw him having dinner and decided that this Frenchman with sharp features was his Winnetou.

There was no turning back.

The 42,000-Mark Contract

Brice didn't speak a word of German when he accepted the role in The Treasure of Silver Lake. He didn't care. German audiences weren't looking for realism but for a utopia of honor in the Wild West. He was paid 42,000 marks for that first film, shot in the arid landscapes of former Yugoslavia.

And the gamble paid off.

The success was so massive that German audiences stopped seeing John Wayne as the only face of the genre. Between 1962 and 1968, he shot eleven films playing the Apache chief. His face was on every school folder in Munich, and his fame outshone that of many Hollywood stars of the era.

But that popularity had a dark side. The French film industry systematically ignored him, while in Germany he was handed popularity awards year after year. To his compatriots, he was simply a second-rate actor lost in fast-food foreign productions.

His image was frozen in time under a black wig and a leather tunic.

The Leather and Feather Cage

He tried to escape the character several times, but audiences wouldn't let him. In 1976 he put on the fringed buckskin jacket again for theater performances at the Elspe Festival. It became an annual ritual where thousands of people came just to see him ride again.

The film industry never forgave him.

In the late seventies, he tried his luck on television in sci-fi series such as Star Maidens and brief appearances in Derrick. But directors only saw him as the noble savage from Karl May's novels. In 1980 he recorded an album, because his baritone voice attracted the masses, but his music career ended up being an anecdote in his biography.

He married Hella Krekel in 1981 and found in her the stability that film shoots had denied him. They lived in a country house near Paris, away from the media noise of Berlin. In 1991, he made one last attempt to recover his star role in the series El regreso de Winnetou.

The reviews were scathing, and the project sank in the ratings with a budget that was never recovered. Pierre Brice died on June 6, 2015, in a Paris hospital from pneumonia at age 86.