Christoph Waltz

Christoph Waltz is an actor born in Vienna on 4 October 1956 and described as Austrian, German and American. He trained at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna and with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler in New York, then spent two decades as a stage and television actor in German-speaking Europe, making his directorial debut in 2000. International recognition came with Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds in 2009, in which he played the SS officer Hans Landa and won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He won a second Oscar in the same category for playing the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz in Tarantino's Django Unchained. He later appeared in Carnage, Big Eyes, Downsizing and Alita: Battle Angel, and played Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond films Spectre and No Time to Die. He has also directed opera productions in Antwerp and Ghent, and took American citizenship in 2020. His honours include two Academy Awards, two BAFTAs and two Golden Globes.