On the subject of tolerance, the Saarland cabaret artist Gerd Dudenhöffer had his stage character Heinz Becker say the following: “I’m really not tolerant. Ernst Thun-Hohenstein saw it similarly. When his youngest son enrolled in theater studies in Munich and was considering becoming an actor, the worried father marched to Axel von Ambesser, one of the most famous actors and directors after the war, with a request to talk the filius out of this nonsense.
Ambetter promised to take a look at the boy, a little later he said to Thun that the boy should try it – and immediately cast the novice in the Kammerspiele in the play “Gewitter am See”. The great director Helmut Käutner sat in the audience, a little later the newcomer was in the film and acted in the “Lasbubengeschichten”. So it started in 1962, the career of Friedrich Ernst Peter Paul Maria Thun-Hohenstein. And on this June 30th, on his 80th birthday, it is not over yet.
Thun’s acting career began with the “Lasbubengeschichten”.
(Photo: private)
A film, television and theater landscape without the grand seigneur, the sophisticated gentleman, the jovial, affable charmer would be a lot poorer. Of the mirror once titled a portrait “A count to cuddle”. Thun has been in front of the camera or on stage in more than 200 productions. He is known from series such as “Der Bastian”, “The Crimes of Professor Capellari”, “Der Bulle von Tölz” or alongside Senta Berger in “Die Schnell Gerdi”. He acted in the Vietnam war drama “OK”, the film adaptation of “A Pale Blue Woman’s Writing” and the comedy “Helen, Fred and Ted”, which earned him the Bavarian Television Prize in 2007. And yes, in the early 1970s he was also part of the cast of the “Schoolgirl Reports”, like many other colleagues who later became something.
In “Benjamin Blümchen” he played the zoo director Mr. Tierlieb, chugged on the “dream ship” and through Rosamunde Pilcher landscapes, still has a leading role in the ARD series “Room with stable”, was most recently in the ZDF six-part series “Der Palace”, at Easter you could hear him as a teacher in the animated film “The Bunny School – The Big Egg Claw”. But he can also be serious: in 1993 he played SS Obersturmfuhrer Rolf Czurda in “Schindler’s List”. And as if that weren’t colorful enough, he also made more than 60 documentaries in which he lived out his longing for adventure and discovery: Bora Bora, Easter Island, Ayers Rock – the curious saw everything. Looking back, he says: “I’m lucky enough to be able to do my job with a lot of pleasure.”
It was not in his cradle that he would end up on stage. Thun was born in the middle of the war, in Moravian Kvasice near Brno, in today’s Czech Republic. His noble family goes back to the 12th century. “They were knights and butlers to the bishops,” he once said in a podcast, “but as a youngster you don’t care.” Later he did some genealogical research and found a Thun who invited Mozart, Chopin wrote a waltz for his grandmother’s sister at home in the castle, and the supreme commander of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico was also a Thun.
He has no memory of the first years in the castle. It only begins in a different cosmos: in a former concentration camp, into which the dispossessed family was put after the war for a year and a half. “My mother had to work in the forest, my father in his own brick factory,” Thun recalls. Hunger was omnipresent: “Once my mother came with an egg. It was then divided for the four children…” Nevertheless, he “didn’t feel it as suffering”. There was “never a word of complaint” from the parents either, so you just have to go through with it. Today he even sees the expulsion as a stroke of luck: “The loss was elementary for the parents. But if we had stayed in Moravia, my eldest brother would have gotten the castle at some point, and I might have become a beet farmer.” So he ended up in Munich, where he “very much likes” to live, he once assured in an interview.
Not even on stage himself, but a spectator: Friedrich von Thun in May at the premiere of the Oberammergau Passion Play.
(Photo: Angelika Warmuth/dpa)
With only one suitcase, the parents fled to Styria with four children, where Friedrich went to boarding school: 40 boys in a dormitory, in winter the water froze: “It was hard, but somehow nice,” Thun remembers. He gets to know classical music and Gregorian chant – and acting when a priest casts him in the theater group in “Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves”. “A completely naïve time,” he recalls, “acting was an outlet for me. If I didn’t know the vocabulary in Greek or Latin, I said: ‘I have to learn Nestroy’s text!’ I had no idea that this would become my profession.” But it was. As much as Papa had fought.