Sylvester Groth

You've got to have considerable panache if you're going to portray Joseph Goebbels not once, but twice--and Sylvester Groth has shown he's got it in spades. Groth first played Nazi Germany's Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in "My Führer," a 2007 satire that poked fun at Hitler's declining fortunes as the war wound down to a close. The performance gained attention, not least from American writer-director Quentin Tarantino, who subsequently cast Groth as the very same fascist with a gift for gab in "Inglourious Basterds," a tongue-in-cheek, blood-splattered re-imagining of how the war was won. Far from typecast as a villain, however, Groth has evoked great sympathy from audiences in other historical roles, such as the part of a determined rescuer in "A Light in Dark Places," the true-life account of 11 trapped miners saved in the 1963 Wunder von Lengede ("miracle of Lengede"). Since his first major part as soldier Otto in the 1993 anti-war film "Stalingrad," Groth has played heroes and villains alike, along with all the other parts in between, plumbing the morally ambiguous gray area that cinema thrives on.