Education
After finishing his school formation he studied acting for two years in Hanover and then he worked as a stage actor in Munich.
Actor television presenter voice actor
After finishing his school formation he studied acting for two years in Hanover and then he worked as a stage actor in Munich.
Hellmut Lange started his acting career on radio drama shows for the West-German Radio Station Sonderforschungsbereich (Sender Freies Berlin= Radio Free Berlin). In the early fifties he played Old Shatterhand on an open air stage. In 1961 he was the principal actor in a German Edgar Wallace adaption for cinema.
The next year he had one of the main roles in a television mini series based on a story of Francis Durbridge.
He also acted as the protagonist of the television series John Kling. Since he had already played Old Shatterhand, a hero which has evidently been inspired by James Fenimore Cooper"s Natty Bumppo, it didn"t come as a surprise that he was considered an appropriate choice for acting as Natty Bumppo himself.
That he did with tremendous success in a German television mini series called after the "leatherstocking ("Lederstrumpf") tales". This television series which starred a Frenchman (Pierre Massimi) as Chingachgook was in many ways the predecessor of the also very successful Karl May films in which Lex Barker (or sometimes Stewart Granger) would team up with the French actor Pierre Brice as Winnetou (note: This cannot be true regarding that the Karl May Western films had been released between 1962 and 1968 while the "Lederstrumpf tales" were produced in 1969, HG).
Instead he appeared in a Hollywood picture about General Patton and was also the German voice of Richard Harris, Charlton Heston, Paul Newman and other American stars for the German dubbed versions of some of their feature films.
German television took advantage of this well-known fact by employing him as presenter of a quiz programme ("Kennen Sie Kino?") which ran from 1971 till 1981. Lange worked successfully as an actor on television until he was over seventy years old. In 2009 it was published that serious health issues would hinder him continuing.
Lederstrumpf and John Klings Abenteuer had just been digitally remastered and released on Digital Video Disc.