Trivia

Ernst Winar was married with actress Colette Brettel.

The actor Ernst Winar was born as Wilhelm Joseph Carl von Eichhoff. After abanding an engineer study because of World War I he impersonated first small roles from 1916 in movies like "Majoor Frans" (1916), "Gloria transita" (1917), and "Een Carmen van het Noorden" (1919).

In 1922, he directed his first feature film, the crime film Der Mann im Hintergrund/The man in the background, but the film was released only after several changes in October 1924.

Winar was one of the few Dutch directors who had mastered the trade of film directing and he would have a major impact in the 1940s and 1950s, when the appearance of a Dutch feature film was rare.

For the Cinetone studios Winar co-directed the film De Kribbebijter/The Double-Patch (1935) with German émigré director Hermann Kosterlitz aka Henry Koster as his co-director. This successful comedy starred Cor Ruys and Frits van Dongen, who later became a well known film actor in Berlin and Hollywood under the name of Philip Dorn.

His first movies were short films with the figure Flappy which was impersonated by Adolphe Engers. After that followed his first feature film with "Der Mann im Hintergrund" (22).

He also translated plays by Ferenc Molnar into Dutch.

Ernst Winar also realised his first movies as a director from 1921.

During the war he presented De laatste dagen van een eiland/The Last days of an island (1942) with Max Croiset, based on a story of Klaas Norel. The film was already recorded in 1938 and privately screened later that year, but only in 1942 publicly, probably because only a few films were approved by the German occupiers. It was the second film produced by the Dutch Christian Film Centre, but during the war this organization was already shut down.

In 1976 he finally appeared one more time in a small role in the TV film Volk en vaderliefde/People and Father Love (1976) based on the story by Herodotus.

When the talkies rang in a new era in film history the film career of Ernst Winar came to an end in Germany. He only appeared in the movie "Die heiligen drei Brunnen" (1930), afterwards he returned to Netherland where his last movie "Vier jongens en een Jeep" (1955) came into being.

In 1923, he also taught directing at the Terra film school in Berlin.

He played on stage under the name of W. Eikhof at the Casino ensemble in The Hague.

When he went to Berlin in 1920 he managed his breakthrough on the big screen and he played in "Die Benezif-Vorstellung der vier Teufel" (1920) his first leading role. He became established as a busy actor in popular German silent movies in the following years.

He also worked for the Foundation Film en Wetenschap (Film and Science) in Utrecht.

After finishing school he began an engineering study in Germany, but World War I forced him to break off this studies. Temporarily exempted from military service, he was employed by the Filmfabriek Hollandia (Film factory Hollandia) in Haarlem as a real Jack of all trades.

After the Second World War, Winar's interest shifted to children's films, such as Dik Trom en zijn dorpsgenoten/Dik Trom and his fellow villagers (1947) with his former director Theo Frenkel Sr. in one of the supporting roles, and Vier jongens en een jeep/Four guys and a jeep (1955) with Sylvain Poons. This was his last feature as a director and he also made his final film appearance in it.

During the 1960s, Winar escorted the young filmmaker Paul Verhoeven as the editor of the short films Een Hagedis teveel/A Lizard Too Much (1960), De Lifters/The Hitchhikers (1962), Feest!/Party! (1963) and Het Korps Mariniers/The Royal Dutch Marine Corps (1965).