Horst Tappert

The actor Horst Tappert, who has died aged 85, was one of the biggest stars of German television from the mid 1960s to the late 1990s. Between 1974 and 1998, he starred in 281 episodes of the police series Derrick, in which his portrayal of the Munich police detective Stephan Derrick earned him a worldwide following. In a German television industry dominated by dubbed American imports, he was a rare homegrown presence with international appeal.

Derrick was an extraordinary export success for the German TV company ZDF. The hour-long episodes were broadcast in 108 countries and dubbed into 12 languages. Australian viewers saw a subtitled edition of Derrick, but it was never screened in the UK. The show numbered Pope John Paul II and Umberto Eco among its fans.

It was a relentlessly pedestrian series that was certainly not universally loved by younger Germans. But for those who tuned in every Friday evening at 8.15, there was something mesmerisingly bland about Tappert's portrayal of the dour detective. The Derrick role made Tappert something close to a national treasure in Germany, but he avoided publicity and gave few interviews. His first big break had arrived in 1966 when he played one of the most famous British criminals of modern times in a docudrama of the 1963 mail train robbery called Gentlemen Prefer Cash (Die Gentlemen Bitten zur Kasse). Gentleman Prefer Cash is still regarded, even by some of the perpetrators of the great train robbery, as the most factually accurate filmed account of the crime.

Tappert played Michael Donegan ("The Major"), the leader of the robbers; it was a part based on the real-life train robber Bruce Reynolds. Shot partly in England, but mostly in Germany, it was a film that appealed to the West German public's fascination for this £2.5m heist. It did not seem to matter that the police cars were inexplicably left-hand drive in some scenes or that the locomotive pulling the mail train, despite its British Railways insignia, was obviously a West German type. The German extras dressed as Metropolitan policemen had to be told not to click their heels.

Cut down to 104 minutes and dubbed into English (Tappert sounded like David Niven), it was released as a B movie in the UK in 1967 as The Great Train Robbery, pitched as a grittier and more true-to-life version than the much flashier Robbery, directed by Peter Yates and released the same year.

Born in Elberfeld (now Wuppertal) in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, Tappert was the son of a postman. He was drafted into the German army straight out of school and ended up as an infantryman in Russia. He spent the last years of the war as a prisoner of the Americans. In civilian life he stumbled across the beginnings of an acting career by accident when he applied for a job as a bookkeeper at a theatre in Stendal. Intrigued, Tappert took acting lessons and had soon given up accountancy for the stage. He appeared in his first film - Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika - in 1958. By the time he was headlining in Gentleman Prefer Cash, Tappert was appearing in five or six German TV films a year, usually as a Scotland Yard detective.

Twice-divorced, Tappert is survived by his third wife, Ursula Pistor, whom he married in 1957, and his children, Karin and Ralph. His youngest son, Gary, predeceased him in 2001.

Horst Tappert, actor, born 26 May 1923; died 13 December 2008

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