Karl Stepanek
Birthday: 1899-10-27
Place of Birth: Brünn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary [now Brno, Czech Republic]
Biography: Though born in Czechoslovakia, actor Karel Stepanek was generally regarded as a German actor due to his extensive film work in Germany (as Karl Stepanek) in the years before World War II. Stepanek fled to England in 1940, where, like many European refugee actors, he specialized in portraying Teutonic villains. He tried to stay away from out-and-out Nazi roles, but his predilection for wearing black uniforms and barking out guttural commands left little doubt as to the political preferences of Stepanek's screen characters. One of his most typical characterizations could be found in the 1946 POW drama, The Captive Heart; Stepanek also registered well as a friendlier foreigner in The Fallen Idol (1949). Commuting between London and Hollywood, Karel Stepanek continued to fight World War II, usually on the wrong side, into such '60s films as Sink the Bismarck! (1960), I Aim at the Stars (1960) and Operation Crossbow (1965).
Movies
Man of the Moment
Norman is a file clerk who accidentally becomes a British delegate to a diplomatic conference, befri...
View Movie
Murderers Club of Brooklyn
Fifth Jerry Cotton Movie. A rich capitalist is blackmailed and threatened with the murder of his dau...
View Movie
The Fallen Idol
Phillipe, the son of an ambassador in London, hero-worships his father's butler Baines. His percepti...
View Movie
Operation Crossbow
Allied agents infiltrate the Nazi rocket complex at Peenemunde in order to obtain their secrets and ...
View Movie
Affair in Trinidad
A nightclub singer enlists her brother-in-law to track down her husband's killer....
View Movie
Anastasia
Russian exiles in Paris plot to collect ten million pounds from the Bank of England by grooming a de...
View Movie
The Cockleshell Heroes
During WW2, German ships are "safely" docked upriver at Bordeaux, but the British send a team of kay...
View Movie
Sink the Bismarck!
The story of the breakout of the German battleship Bismarck—accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz E...
View Movie
The File of the Golden Goose
U.S. Secret Service agent Peter Novak goes undercover with Scotland Yard officer Thompson to halt a ...
View Movie
Die Fledermaus
The delightful Johann Strauss comic opera Die Fledermaus was mercilessly lampooned in this truly biz...
View Movie
The Captive Heart
A series of stories about the lives and loves of men in a Prisoner of War camp over five years. The ...
View Movie
They Met in the Dark
A Royal navy Commander is tricked by a pretty girl who is working for the Nazis. She tricks him into...
View Movie
Walk East on Beacon
An FBI agent works with a refugee scientist and the Coast Guard to crack a Soviet spy ring in Boston...
View Movie
The Frozen Dead
A crazed scientist keeps the heads of Nazi war criminals alive until he can find appropriate bodies ...
View Movie
Secret Venture
An American is visiting Britain and finds himself in possession of a briefcase full of secret docume...
View Movie
Sperrbezirk
The story of a pimp who falls in love with one of his victims, is "purified" by it, but also perishe...
View Movie
A Prize of Gold
A U.S. sergeant, a British sergeant and a British pilot hijack gold for a German refugee's war orpha...
View Movie
Before Winter Comes
Drama/Comedy set in a refugee camp in occupied Austria after World War II. A shrewd multi-lingual in...
View Movie
Tale of Three Women
A compilation of 3 stories, "The Wedding Gift", "The Thief of London" and "The Final Twist". Origina...
View Movie
Licensed to Kill
An English spy (Tom Adams) guards a Scandinavian scientist (Karl Stepanek) who has sold an anti-grav...
View Movie
Dangerous Cargo
Inspired by the real events of the attempted heist at Heathrow Airport in 1952, a criminal tricks an...
View Movie
Cairo Road
In colonial Egypt, a British police officer sets out on a daring hunt for drug smuggling gangs opera...
View Movie
West of Suez
In this suspense movie, a Yankee mercenary is hired to blow up an Arab dignitary....
View Movie
Operation Amsterdam
When Germany invades Holland in 1940, a British intelligence officer and two Dutch diamond merchants...
View Movie
Five from the Jazzband
By pure chance, Jessie and his four jazz musicians are hired to play at the cabaret theatre “Trocade...
View Movie
Berlin-Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf
Franz Biberkopf has served four years in prison. His return to normal life is not successful....
View Movie
Tomorrow We Live
British World War II film set in occupied France, portraying the activities of members of the French...
View Movie
The Third Man
In postwar Vienna, Austria, Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives penniless as a guest o...
View Movie
Give Us This Day
Exiled from Hollywood due to the blacklist, director Edward Dmytryk briefly operated in England in t...
View Movie
Rough Shoot
An American military officer and his wife move to a cottage in what they think is the peaceful Engli...
View Movie
Secret Mission
World War II drama in which a member of the French Resistance and three British agents undertake a h...
View Movie
The Leghorn Hat
Der Florentiner Hut (The Leghorn Hat), a 1939 German film directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner...
View Movie
The Third Visitor
Suave supercilious Carling (Karel Stepanek) receives several callers to his isolated house, all of w...
View Movie
Brainwashed
Werner von Basil, a Austrian intellectual, was captured by the Nazis in 1938. They want to break him...
View Movie
The Heroes of Telemark
Set in German-occupied Norway, resistance fighter Knut Straud enlists the reluctant physicist Rolf P...
View Movie
The Unknown
The body of an unknown beautiful woman is fished out of the river and leaves the policemen wondering...
View Movie
Escape to Danger
During the Second World War a British schoolteacher working in Denmark is caught up when the Germans...
View Movie
Here's Berlin
Story of a rendezvous in Paris which is prepared through telephone calls between a Berlin telephonis...
View Movie
A Song for You
During a concert tour, famous tenor Riccardo Gatti meets Lixie at an Aida rehearsal and takes her fo...
View Movie
War es der im 3. Stock?
Olga, a woman of the demimonde, is shot in her apartment. The bullet was deflected by something, oth...
View Movie
Hermine and the Seven Upright Men
Seven men in peaceful Switzerland swear lifelong friendship while the rest of the world is at strife...
View Movie
State Secret
While working in England, an American surgeon Dr. John Marlowe is invited to Vosnia (a fictitious Ea...
View Movie
Broken Journey
A plane flying over the Swiss Alps develops engine trouble and is forced to crash-land on a glacier....
View Movie
The Man in the Road
A brilliant scientist who has lost his memory is hunted by Communist agents out to obtain a secret f...
View Movie
The Games
From Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, Australia and behind the Iron Curtain. They ar...
View Movie
Waltz War
The quarrel between the waltz king Joseph Lanner and his still unknown violinist Johann Strauss. It ...
View Movie
The Heroes of Telemark: Location report from Norway
Over one hour of black-and-white location footage and interviews with the stars and director, all st...
View Movie
Our Man in Havana
Jim Wormold is an expatriate Englishman living in pre-revolutionary Havana with his teenage daughter...
View Movie
Golden Arrow
On a journey from Paris to London, a Briton, a Frenchman and an American bond with each other and in...
View Movie
No Highway in the Sky
James Stewart plays aeronautical engineer Theodore Honey, the quintessential absent-minded professor...
View Movie
Hotel Sacher
Vienna is celebrating New Year’s Eve 1913/14. It is the year, which will see the outbreak of the Fi...
View Movie
The Traitor
One time members of a resistance group come together every year to remember their dead leader, betra...
View Movie
Counterblast
An escaped World War 2 Nazi doctor impersonates a murdered English doctor so he can work on a vaccin...
View Movie
Our Film
A British factory is inefficient because of pre-war rules and red tape. A Soviet trades union repres...
View Movie
Die Werft zum grauen Hecht
Otto is pressured by his former girlfriend Mila to marry her. His friend and colleague Franz gets hi...
View Movie