Celebrity Profile

By Dana Simpson TV Media

There is a strange phenomenon with regard to the roles of AustrianGerman actor Christoph Waltz. According to the popular website IMDb.com, Waltz fans have noted a correlation between his characters’ villainy and their level of facial hair, stating that the more facial hair his characters have, the nicer and more moral they are. Conversely, the more clean-shaven Waltz’s characters, the more evil they have a tendency to be (think S.S. Col. Hans Landa in 2009’s “Inglourious Basterds”).

In his newest project, Prime Video’s “The Consultant,” premiering Friday, Feb. 24, Waltz portrays Regus Patoff, a consultant brought in to oversee operations at Los Angeles-based tech company CompWare. And for those now curious, yes, the titular consultant is meticulously clean shaven.

Christoph Waltz was born Oct. 4, 1956, to Austrian costume designer Elisabeth Urbancic and German stage designer Johannes Waltz in Vienna, Austria. While his parents were not front and center in the performance industry, Waltz and his three siblings grew up surrounded by theatre and design — especially once the acting careers of his maternal grandmother, Maria Mayen, and step-grandfather, Rudolph von Urban, are taken into consideration.

After having attended private schools in Vienna, Waltz decided on a future in the dramatic arts and pursued an education at Max Reinhardt Seminar, a Viennese university for music and the performing arts, before moving to New York and enrolling at the Lee Strasburg Institute.

While there, he met his first wife, a Jewish-American psychotherapist named Jacqueline “Jackie” Rauch. The pair first returned to Vienna but later moved to London, where they raised their three children, Leon, Miriam and Rachel, before ultimately divorcing after nearly two decades together.