Background
Fritz Wepper was born as the son of a lawyer who got missed as a soldier in Poland in 1945.
Fritz Wepper was born as the son of a lawyer who got missed as a soldier in Poland in 1945.
He is best known for his role as Inspector Harry Klein in the long-running crime series Derrick. He started his acting career in a production of Peter Pan at the age of eleven. He got his first important film role in Tischlein deck dich, a film adaption of the Brothers Grimm fairytale The Wishing Table.
Wepper kept his popularity with German audiences into adulthood and appeared in several notable German films of the 1960s.
In 1972 he played Fritz Wendel, a Jew passing as a Christian, in the Oscar-winning film version of Cabaret, opposite Liza Minnelli and Marisa Berenson. His character Harry Klein, the assistant in the long-running crime series Derrick, became a cult figure all over the world.
He played this role between 1974 and 1998 in 281 episodes of Derrick. Before playing Klein in Derrick he portrayed the same character on the popular television drama Der Kommissar (1969–1976) from the series" start until 1974 when he was transferred to Derrick.
Fritz and Elmar Wepper appeared together in the television series Zwei Brüder (1994-2000), playing a pair of different brothers hunting criminals and solve difficult cases.
Since 2002, Wepper plays the tricky Mayor Wolfgang Wöller in the immensely popular television series Um Himmels Willen (with some 72 million views per episode). Wepper is married Angela von Morgan in 1979.