Ernst Winar

Ernst Winar was born on September 3, 1894 in Leiden, Netherlands as Wilhelm Joseph Carl von Eichhoff.

The actor Ernst Winar was born as Wilhelm Joseph Carl von Eichhoff. After abanding an engineer study because of World War I he impersonated first small roles from 1916 in movies like "Majoor Frans" (1916), "Gloria transita" (1917), and "Een Carmen van het Noorden" (1919).

When he went to Berlin in 1920 he managed his breakthrough on the big screen and he played in "Die Benezif-Vorstellung der vier Teufel" (1920) his first leading role. He became established as a busy actor in popular German silent movies in the following years.

Ernst Winar also realised his first movies as a director from 1921.

He was an actor and director, known for Der Mann im Hintergrund (1922), De man op den achtergrond (1922) and De laatste dagen van een eiland (1942).

In 1923, he also taught directing at the Terra film school in Berlin.

When the talkies rang in a new era in film history the film career of Ernst Winar came to an end in Germany. He only appeared in the movie "Die heiligen drei Brunnen" (1930), afterwards he returned to Netherland where his last movie "Vier jongens en een Jeep" (1955) came into being.

For the Cinetone studios Winar co-directed the film De Kribbebijter/The Double-Patch (1935) with German émigré director Hermann Kosterlitz aka Henry Koster as his co-director. This successful comedy starred Cor Ruys and Frits van Dongen, who later became a well known film actor in Berlin and Hollywood under the name of Philip Dorn.

Winar was one of the few Dutch directors who had mastered the trade of film directing and he would have a major impact in the 1940s and 1950s, when the appearance of a Dutch feature film was rare.

During the war he presented De laatste dagen van een eiland/The Last days of an island (1942) with Max Croiset, based on a story of Klaas Norel. The film was already recorded in 1938 and privately screened later that year, but only in 1942 publicly, probably because only a few films were approved by the German occupiers. It was the second film produced by the Dutch Christian Film Centre, but during the war this organization was already shut down.

After the Second World War, Winar's interest shifted to children's films, such as Dik Trom en zijn dorpsgenoten/Dik Trom and his fellow villagers (1947) with his former director Theo Frenkel Sr. in one of the supporting roles, and Vier jongens en een jeep/Four guys and a jeep (1955) with Sylvain Poons. This was his last feature as a director and he also made his final film appearance in it.

During the 1960s, Winar escorted the young filmmaker Paul Verhoeven as the editor of the short films Een Hagedis teveel/A Lizard Too Much (1960), De Lifters/The Hitchhikers (1962), Feest!/Party! (1963) and Het Korps Mariniers/The Royal Dutch Marine Corps (1965).

In 1976 he finally appeared one more time in a small role in the TV film Volk en vaderliefde/People and Father Love (1976) based on the story by Herodotus.