Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder started leading the Anti-Theater troupe in 1967, staging early work before his first feature, the gangster film Love Is Colder Than Death, arrived in 1969. He broke through domestically with The Merchant of Four Seasons in 1972, then internationally with Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 1974. His films pulled from post-war German wreckage - Nazism's aftermath, the economic miracle, the Red Army Faction - and fixed on the margins: migrant workers, prisoners, gay lives. The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1979, tracking a woman's rise and collapse after World War II, became his biggest success. He kept a tight company of actors and crew, cycling them through projects that ranged from the lesbian chamber piece The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to the TV epics World on a Wire and Berlin Alexanderplatz, big-budget studio jobs like Despair and Lili Marleen, and late homoerotic work including Querelle. On 10 June 1982, a lethal mix of cocaine and barbiturates stopped him at 37.