Peter Beauvais

Peter Beauvais (September 9, 1916, Wunsiedel, Germany – December 17, 1986, Baden-Baden, Germany) was a German television film director and scriptwriter. As a director for three decades, he helped pioneer and significantly influenced the development of German television.

Beauvais was the son of a factory owner of Jewish origin. He attended the Municipal Liebig High School in Frankfurt am Main, where he studied drama, until 1935. In 1936, under the Nazi regime, he was forced to emigrate to the United States on account of his Jewish background. There he worked as an actor on Broadway. Beauvais returned to Germany in 1945 or 1946 with the United State Army, for whom worked as an interpreter, including for the Nuremberg Trials, and as a theatre officer.

In 1950 Beauvais became an actor at the theatre in Hanover, then worked as an actor and trainee director at Werner Finck's Kabarett Die Mausefalle (Mousetrap Cabaret) in Stuttgart, and acted in American films produced in Germany. His first television direction work was in 1954, for Südwestfunk (Southwest Radio). In 1958–1960 he directed two theatrical films for UFA. He then moved back to television for good, directing more than 100 television films and episodes from 1960 to 1986. From 1962 to 1967, collaborating with the writer Horst Lommer, Beauvais directed a popular series of films for NDR.

Over the course of his career, Beauvais created a prolific and wide-ranging body of work including comedies, satires, crime films, dramas, and science fiction films. Beauvais adapted for television literary works by writers including Arthur Schnitzler, Anton Chekhov, and Joseph Roth, and directed Eugene O'Neill's Trauer muss Elektra tragen (Mourning Becomes Electra), starring Peter Pasetti. He also adapted and filmed works by contemporary writers including Siegfried Lenz, Karin Struck, Adolf Muschg, and Martin Walser, and original teleplays by writers including Peter Stripp, Daniel Christoff, and Horst Lommer.

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