Biographie
In 1997, "Sleepless Cities", a multi-lingual one-man show with songs by Kurt Weill, Burt Bacharach, Jacques Prévert, and Tori Amos, started the career of the very ambitious André Schneider who would later enter the stage as a stand-up comedian, appear as an extra in movies by Peter Greenaway and Michael Caton-Jones, become a musician and writer and finally produce and direct his own feature films.
At the age of twenty, he gave his stage debut in his hometown of Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, co-starring with Michael Demuth in the enormously successful musical "Zoff". One year later, he relocated to Berlin, and in 2001, he moved to London.
Both his first book, "Life is a Sexually Transmitted Disease", and the pop album "Lover's Space" came out in 2004, and after the release of Deed Poll (2004), which went on to become a cult favorite, André worked extensively in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. In Germany, he worked as a writer-actor on Ingo J. Biermann's ill-fated drama Glastage (2007) and did Der Mann im Keller (2008) with Nikolaus Firmkranz. The latter also became his directorial debut.
In 2006, André wrote, produced and starred in Half Past Ten (2008), based on a Marguerite Duras novel, directed by Sascha Bachmann and co-starring Kerstin Linnartz. Subsequently, he was cast in a string of (mostly unreleased) Spanish student films before he eventually decided to take a hiatus from the movies for almost two years, focusing on his theatre work instead.
Alex und der Löwe (2010), a gay romantic comedy with Marcel Schlutt, Sascia Haj, and Udo Lutz, was André's first film as a writer-producer-actor in almost three years. He played the title role of Alex, a 30-year-old Berlin-based man who clumsily stumbles from one relationship to the next. The movie fared surprisingly well, and so André revived his part in what was little more than a cameo in its highly successful, multi-award winning successor, Men to Kiss (2012). Still, working in droll German comedies left him dissatisfied and unhappy. "It was a dead-end career for me, I was desperate for new challenges," he later recalled.
In order to revive his movie career with fresh impulses, he began shooting his first French feature, A Second Chance (2012) in late 2011. A courageous move that proved to be a smart one: A Second Chance (2012) became an immediate critical success in France, Spain, and Greece, allowing its writer-director-star to continue working in Paris. In One Deep Breath (2014), a gloomy thriller co-starring Manuel Blanc and Stéphanie Michelini under the direction of Antony Hickling (an acclaimed genius of the art house genre), André created the part of Thomas Laroppe's concerned half-brother Adrian, and in Le cadeau (2013), a poetic short based on poetry by Pablo Neruda, he played Anton. Between 2015 and 2018, he established himself as a character actor in France with parts in movies like Boulevard Voltaire (2017), Frig (2018), The Ghosts (2018) (co-starring Judith Magre and Sophie Tellier), and On My Mother's Path (2016).
In addition to his movie work, his biography of B-movie actress Marisa Mell received rave reviews and became quite a success in 2013. In 2018, he dissolved his company, Vivàsvan Pictures, and started studying pedagogy and philosophy. Still an avid writer, André lives in Strasbourg, France.
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