Dominique Horwitz was born and raised in Paris. In the early 1970s his family moved to Berlin. Engagements have taken him to Berlin's CaDeWe (Cabaret des Westens) and Tübingen's Zimmertheater, to the Bavarian State Theater in Munich, and to Hamburg's Thalia Theater. Dieter Wedel introduced him to television in Der große Bellheim (The Great Bellheim). He achieved his international breakthrough in 1993 with the main role in Josef Vilsmaier's Stalingrad. Since then he has appeared in many film and television productions. He has continued to celebrate great successes also on the stage, including in The Black Rider directed by Robert Wilson, in the Three-Penny Opera directed by Katherina Thalbach, and in Harold Pinter's Moonlight directed by Peter Zadek.

Having grown up with the chansons of Jacques Brel, Dominique Horwitz put together his own program of songs by the great chansonnier for the first time in 1984, which earned him enthusiastic comparisons to the original. His instinctive feeling for music has made him one of the most sought-after artists for the musical-literary genre: whether Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat, Beethoven's Egmont, or Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream – Horwitz sings, acts, and speaks the roles in these performances with incomparable intensity. He has additionally recorded numerous works on CD, including the melodramas Antigone, Athalia, and Oedipus by Felix Mendelssohn with the MDR Symphony Orchestra, and Histoire du Soldat with soloists from the Berlin Philharmonic. Among the artists with whom Dominique Horwitz has collaborated on various occasions are Daniel Barenboim, Valery Gergiev, Christoph Eschenbach, and Isabelle Faust.

In January 2012 Horwitz made his debut as opera director with Weber's Freischütz at the Erfurt Theater. In 2015 he stepped into the limelight for the first time as an author with the crime novel Death in Weimar. In 1992 Horwitz was awarded the Golden Lion as best actor, and received the Mephisto Prize in 2002 for his program of Brel chansons.

Photo: (c) Ralf Brinkhoff