Devid Striesow

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, East German Devid Striesow was studying to be a goldsmith. With the reunification of his native country, he realized he had the opportunity to go to school for acting instead, and he never looked back. Shortly after completing his theater studies in Berlin, Striesow graduated to the professional stage and also began appearing before the cameras. One of his earliest movie roles was a prominent one--he played an officious cop in the 2001 comedy/drama "What to do in Case of Fire?," about a group of 1980s radicals uncomfortably reuniting. The actor continued to win parts in other well-known German films throughout the decade, including a role as the reluctant dog handler Tornow in "Downfall," the 2004 Oscar-nominated drama about the final days of Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. Striesow also appeared in another internationally distributed film set in the same era, "The Counterfeiters," this time portraying an SS officer. Although primarily a character actor, he was the male lead in "Yella" (2007), a thriller about a woman trapped in a marriage to a dangerous man. During his career, Striesow appeared on TV almost as frequently as he did in movies. Among his many appearances on the small screen, he played the recurring role of Jan Martensen in the crime drama "Bella Block" (2005).