Ulli Lommel

Ulli Lommel
Lommel in January 2007
Born	(1944-12-21) 21 December 1944 (age 72) Zielenzig, Oststernberg, Germany (now Sulęcin, Lubuskie, Poland)
Occupation	Actor, director
Years active	1963–present
Spouse(s)	Suzanna Love

Ulli Lommel (born 21 December 1944) is a German actor and director, noted for his many collaborations with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and his association with the New German Cinema movement. Lommel is also well known for the time which he spent at The Factory and as a creative associate of Andy Warhol, with whom he made several films and works of art. Since 1977 he has lived and worked in the USA, where he has written, directed and starred in over 50 movies.

Born in Zielenzig in 1944, a few weeks before the arrival of the Red Army, Lommel's family fled the city, wrapping the infant Ulli in a roll of carpet. His father, Ludwig Manfred Lommel, was a popular radio personality. His mother was the actress Karla van Cleef.

While living in Bad Nauheim as a teenager, Lommel performed with Elvis Presley.

Lommel started his cinematic career as an actor in the early 1960s. One of his first film roles was in Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill, in which he starred alongside Italian actress Letícia Román. This began a long series of roles in which Lommel would play a romantic, or gentlemanly lead.

In 1969, he appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's directorial debut Love Is Colder Than Death. The movie, an existentialist, film noir, received a shocked and confused response at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969, but the cast as an ensemble would go on to win an award at the German Film Awards in 1970.

Fassbinder and Lommel worked together more than 20 times over the course of a decade after they first began their creative partnership, with several of their collaborations becoming multi-award winning movies.