Kinski Uncut: The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From his tortured childhood in the poverty of prewar Berlin - starving, stealing, perpetually frostbitten - his conscription, at age sixteen, into the German army in the last year of World War II, and on through his rise to international stardom as a film actor, Kinski carried with him a personal hell: an unendurable sense of isolation ameliorated only through acting and sex. Acting would raise him from squalid poverty to international celebrity. It would send him from Old World Europe to fast-and-loose Hollywood, from the back lots of Hong Kong's movie factories to the deepest jungles of Africa. To maintain his lifestyle and satiate his creative needs, he appeared in more than 160 films, anything from schlock Hollywood comedies to classics such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. His Casanovian pursuit of sex, beginning as a child with his sister and on through countless liaisons - from Moroccan prostitutes to the rich and famous - is chronicled in graphic detail.

SYNOPSIS

The unexpurgated cult classic detailing the life of a talented and bizarre man.

FROM THE CRITICS

Dwight Garner

"Why am I a whore?" That's the question the late German-born actor Klaus Kinski asks himself early in this wildly raw and misanthropic memoir, and it's a query with multiple meanings. Kinski Uncut, which is finally being issued in an unexpurgated English version after becoming a cult favorite overseas (it has been published in six languages), is an almost satirically dark tour through the primordial ooze of Kinski's inflated ego. Brimming with buggery, bigotry and mindless violence, it reads like a (muddled) Celine novel as updated by Keith Richards' dark twin. It's unlike any celebrity bio ever put to paper.

Kinski's Cassanovian pursuit of sex ("I need love! Love! Nonstop!") gives the book its narrative push -- from roughly the age of 10, he feasts on nuns, teenagers, the teenager's mothers or whatever sack of animate female flesh falls into his path. Unfortunately, Kinski's whorishness extended into his career, too. While he appeared in a handful of memorable films (Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God), the haunted-eyed actor also made literally hundreds of schlock-filled quickies, sometimes as many as 11 per year.

Kinski doesn't provide much New Age analysis of how he found himself locked into such a bitter, isolated spiral. Chapters on his impoverished upbringing in prewar Berlin, where he stole food to survive, and his conscription into the German army in World War II offer meager clues. His various wives and his daughter, the actress Nastassja Kinski, receive only the barest mentions.

Kinski spends more time blasting directors he's worked with. Werner Herzog, with whom he made his best films, is called a (take a deep breath) "miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, blackmailing, cowardly, thoroughly dishonest reep." Steven Spielberg offers Kinski a part in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he turns it down because the script is "moronically shitty." David Lean "has a red Rolls-Royce Cabriolet, which, aside from the satyr [Kinski's latest sex toy], is what interests me most about making Zhivago."

Needless to say, this kind of nonstop venom isn't for the squeamish -- and maybe it's not for anyone. But Kinski Uncut does have a kind of raffish, gothic, back-lit charm. A compendium of sick thrills, it is -- if nothing else -- a fail-safe antidote to a shelf of bright, happy, as-told-to biographies. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Few celebrity memoirs are remotely as raw, pornographic and confessional as this notorious self-portrait by German actor Kinski (1926-1991), today best known for his brooding, expressionistic performances in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. When Random House, fearing legal problems, withdrew publication in 1989 of an earlier version of this book, All I Need Is Love, Kinski's memoir became an underground classic. This new and, according to Viking, unabridged translation shows little patience for documentary minutiae. So manic, hallucinatory and self-obsessed is Kinski's account of his rise from a dire childhood in the slums of Berlin to international stardom that it yields a far clearer picture of his seething inner life and incorrigible womanizing than of his film career. In an angry, raving, sometimes barely coherent present-tense narrative, Kinski describes being drafted into the Nazi army at 16; suffering in an English POW camp; gaining prominence in the fringe theater of a war-ravaged Germany. He goes on to cover his star turns in a slew of second-tier genre pictures shot in Italy and France as he contemptuously turned down directors like Fellini and Kurosawa, who wouldn't pay his escalating salary. He then discusses his roles in the Herzog films, plagued by production problems in the depths of the Amazon jungle. Kinski's take on Herzog drips bile and exudes dementia ("he doesn't have the foggiest inkling of how to make movies. Every scene, every angle, every shot is determined by me"). Throughout the memoir, however, acting is mere background to a lifelong sexual odyssey, including dozens of encounters explicitly rendered here--with young actresses, hookers, chambermaids and, in two memorable scenes, Alberto Moravia's wife and Idi Amin's daughter. In this raging memoir, the devil isn't just in the details: he's everywhere. (Aug.)

Kirkus Reviews

Substantially rewritten, expanded and retranslated, this volume supersedes the late actor's 1989 All I Need Is Love.

Kinski, who died in 1991, had a richly deserved reputation as one of the bad boys of European cinema, a volatile personality both on screen and off. Kinski offers vivid recollections of a horrific childhood. Born in 1926, he grew up in Danzig in suffocating poverty, his father a failed pharmacist who couldn't support his wife and four children. At 16 Kinski found himself drafted into the Wehrmacht as as a battered Germany threw adolescents into battle in a last-ditch attempt to stave off defeat. Kinski deserted repeatedly and ended up a British POW. When he was released, he returned to Germany, where in a desultory fashion he began to pursue a career in theater. Eventually, he developed a reputation as an enfant terrible of considerable talent and graduated to film work. He worked his way through three wives, having one child by each (including his famous daughter, Nastassja). The overwhelming majority of the book's pages are devoted to a seemingly endless string of sexual experiences: Kinski has sex with virtually every woman he meets. He even has a heated encounter with his sister. Unfortunately, he lacks the pornographic imagination and richly inventive language of Henry Miller, who seems to hover over Kinski's shoulder. The actor repeatedly collapses into sentimental cliché, straining for richer metaphor but to no avail. Moreover, he uses this autobiography as an opportunity to heap abuse on nearly everyone he ever worked with.

Combine a monstrously huge ego (Kinski compares himself, favorably, to Jesus Christ) with an endless catalog of couplings, and the result is a dully repetitive and ultimately repellent reading experience.