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Bernhard-Viktor von Bülow, 1923-2011
posted January 1, 2012
Bernhard-Viktor "Vikko" von Bülow, the popular cartoonist and illustrator turned filmmaker, actor and prose author, better known to his fans as "Loriot,"
died on August 22 from complications due to old age. He was 87 years old.
The son of a Brandenburg police officer and a scion of a prominent German family, Von Bülow graduated college and became an officer in the German army during World War 2. He attended the Academy of Art in Hamburg after the war, and in the 1950s found work as a cartoonist. His clients included
Die Strasse and
Stern. It was during that initial period that he assumed the
nom de plume for which he was best known, "Loriot." (This was French for "oriole," the bird on the artist's family crest.) His long-running features at
Stern were "Wahre Geschichten Erlogen von Loriot" and "Reinhold des Nashorn.
Loriot moved into television comedy in the 1960s with the show
Cartoon. He later had two shows bearing his pen name,
in the late 1970s and then again some
twenty years later. He was the writer and director and star of the well-received movies
Oedipussi and
Pappa ante Portas. According to wire reports, both his cartoon collections and his prose books sold in the seven-figure range.
In 1998 the artist received a Great Cross Of Merit With Star award for his body of work. He made appearances on media-generated lists of favorite Germans. Von Bülow spent many of his older years out of the public eye at his home on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria.
A private burial is planned.