- Father of Hans-Peter Minetti.
- The son of an architect. Studied in Kiel and Munich and learned acting in Berlin, 1925-27. Made his stage debut with the Prussian State Theatre in 1930. Appeared in classical roles, including 'Hamlet'. Films from 1931, usually in subtle, but highly expressive character roles. After the war, became manager of the Stadttheater Kiel, also starting to direct. Performed on most of Germany's best-known stages, latterly in plays by Brecht and Beckett. Made regular appearances in made-for-television films from 1957. A much respected actor, he was awarded the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1978.
- The actor Bernhard Minetti made his theater debut at the Reissische Theater Gera in 1927 after a three-year acting school. With this he initiated a great theater career.
- During the war, he remained politically uncommitted, torn between the attractions of Nazism and Communism, as he later was to acknowledge himself.
- His name recognition in the film business is no match for the one at the theater. After the war he ignored the film business for a long time and dedicated to the theater. He was very successful at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and appeared in whole Germany with guest performances.
- Bernhard Minetti was the last of a pre-war generation of giants of the German stage, a generation which included names such as Gustav Grundgens and Werner Krauss.
- Heiner Muller's staging of Brecht's Arturo Ui, said of him: "he was a monster, wicked and caustic. His tenderness was dangerous and his helplessness shocking. He was a monolith, not to be easily consumed. He could hold his own against this world, against the terror of the nice and the pretty.".
- The controversial director Claus Peyman called him "the King of Theatre".
- As a young man he moved to Berlin, where he attended Leopold Jessner's acting school.
- Minetti was the ideal protagonist for the theatre of protest against a society predicated on wealth, forgetting, and complacency, which was attacked so virulently by authors such as Heiner Muller and Bernhard, and by directors like Claus Peyman (who first cast him as Lear in 1972) and Klaus Michael Gruber, all names intimately associated with Minetti's late, great roles, which he continued to play, despite ill-health, until 1998, his 71st year on stage.
- Minetti's co-operation with Peyman and Bernhard, his seminal Faust, Hamlet and King Lear - all this was after the Second World War, fruits of a second career, after a first one lived in the shadow of great colleagues.
- His first engagements led him in the next years to Darmstadt and finally to Berlin to the Preussisches Staatstheater where he was a member from 1930 to 1945.
- Bernhard Minetti said that not age but the increasing distraction of other media, the refined vocabulary of the acting profession and the demands made by writers such as Harold Pinter and Thomas Bernhard had made his profession more challenging.
- The closure of the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in the 1990s, his artistic home and a casualty of the new realities of German reunification, was a heavy blow to Minetti, both personally and professionally, but he continued to work until the very end.
- His children Hans-Peter Minetti and Jeniffer Minetti also became actors as well.
- After the Second World War, during a period on the move, great roles and great directors sought him out until in 1965 he finally settled in Berlin.
- Bernhard Minetti made his film debut in 1931 with the movie "Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff". In the following years he normally played important support roles in the well-known movies "Berlin - Alexanderplatz" (1931), Fridericus" (1936), or "Robert Koch, der Bekämpfer des Todes" (1939).
- Thomas Bernhard wrote a play for him, a portrait of the artist as an old man, which bears his name.
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