Dirch Passer
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Dirch Hartvig Passer (May 18, 1926 - September 3, 1980) was a Danish actor. Dirch Passer was greatly renowned for his incredibly humorous and improvisational skills as an actor.
Dirch Passer was, with a filmography counting 110 movies, one of the most active Danish actors ever.
When he was young, Passer was very shy, and had a dream of becoming an actor, but since his father wanted him to get a real job, he attended J. Lauritzen's sea training school near Svendborg in 1944. But since he had ongoing problems with seasickness, he later started at De frederiksbergske teatres Elevskole.
During the 1950s he formed a duo with his colleague and friend Kjeld Petersen. Their revue sketches based upon the contrast between Petersen’s mixture of joviality and desperate anger and Passer’s almost passive dead pan comic are still classics. The sudden death of Kjeld Petersen 1962 made Dirch Passer avoiding revues for some years but he built up a single career and from 1967 he also returned to the revue gaining new victories. Many thin jokes in the manuscripts were greatly improved by his performance. Especially his many amiable-eccentric “nature experts” together with his sketch roles as a baby and as a nonsense "Russian"-speaking clown made hits. From his later years must be mentioned an almost silent sketch in which he portrays a man’s vain attempt of stopping smoking (also shown in West German TV).
He was often referred to as a very loud actor in spite of the fact that under-acting made much of his force. A Danish critic (Jens Kistrup) once said that one of the secrets behind the comic of Passer was its combination of elements that are normally regarded incompatible. He possessed noisiness and discretion, loudness and quietness, boundlessness and complete control, craziness and softness – all this combined with a special intimacy with the audience. Among his inspirations he mentioned Joe E. Brown but he was also known for his admiration of the British comedian Tommy Cooper. In his films that were often of very various qualities he often played kind and a bit crazy Mr. Everymen as often as not anti heroes. Among his best movie roles were stage roles transferred to film, here must be mentioned the hero in Charley’s Aunt (1959), Celestin-Floridor in Frøken Nitouche, (1963) and Leopold in Summer in Tyrol (i. e. The White Horse Inn, 1964).
Numerous Danish actors see him as a role model. In regular day-to-day life he was quite shy in behaviour, somewhat the opposite of his theatrical appearances. He died during a sketch in which he was portraying the Danish rock singer Kim Larsen.
