George Roubicek
Roubicek is Austrian, and British casting directors of the 1950s and 60s did exactly what you would expect with that. Look at the roles: German Prisoner in The One That Got Away, a Nazi in the anthology series Espionage, a German submarine crewman in Murphy's War. When he was not the enemy he was a uniform on the other side, Lieutenant Berger in The Bedford Incident or an astronaut in You Only Live Twice.
It is a career of functional parts, and functional parts in very good films. He is Private Gardner in The Dirty Dozen, Edgar in Billion Dollar Brain, a policeman in Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing. He also appeared in the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Tomb of the Cybermen, played Semenkin in The Champions, and had a small role as an Imperial commander in the first Star Wars film; none of those are among the credits listed here.
The more durable half of his working life happened behind a microphone. Roubicek became a dialogue director and script adaptor for English-language versions of foreign films and television, the job that decides whether a dubbed film sounds like people or like furniture. It is invisible work by design, which is why a great many English-speaking viewers have heard his choices without ever knowing his face.
Movies (7)
TV (1)
Where to start with George Roubicek
There is no lead performance to point you at, so pick by the film rather than the part. The Dirty Dozen is the big one and his Private Gardner is in the thick of it. The Bedford Incident is the better film, a cold-war destroyer-versus-submarine standoff that stays tense without a single action scene.
You Only Live Twice is the Bond sighting, Billion Dollar Brain the Harry Palmer spy picture from the same year, and Bad Timing is the strangest thing on the list by a distance. The One That Got Away is the earliest and, oddly, the most on-brand: a prisoner-of-war film in which the escaping German is the hero.