Paul Müller (11 March 1923, Neuchâtel – 2 September 2016, Tivoli) was a Swiss actor. He spent most of his working life in Italy; Thanks to his tall, thin appearance, he became the sought-after face of villain, authoritative and dark character roles for more than half a century.
His life and career
He moved to France when he was young and started performing in Paris during the Second World War. In the same period, he entered the Paris National Conservatory of Dramatic Art. After the war, he was in Indochina with the French army; The malaria he caught here caused him to lose some of his hearing. After continuing his acting in theater in France, Germany and Italy, he switched to cinema in the late 1940s.
He became a frequent supporting actor in Italian cinema from the 1950s onwards. Roberto Rossellini's films Viaggio in Italia and Due notti con Cleopatra (both 1954), Riccardo Freda's 1957 I Vampiri and René Clément's Plein soleil (1960) are among the works of this period. He turned to the horror genre with the vampire I.
He worked frequently with Spanish director Jesús Franco from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s; Count Dracula (1970) is a known example of this partnership. In the following years, he appeared in some films of the Fantozzi series and in the German crime series Derrick.
He appeared in more than two hundred cinema and television productions in his career spanning from 1948 to the early 2000s. He died on September 2, 2016, in Tivoli, Italy, at the age of 93.
