Egon Hoegen

Egon Hoegen (28 September 1928 – 1 June 2018) was a German actor and off-camera voice artist.

Early years Egon Hoegen was born in Düsseldorf and grew up at Linz am Rhein, still on the right bank of the Rhine, but approximately 80 km / 50 miles upriver. His father was a lawyer. The gift of an unusually resonant voice, as he later recalled, was spotted while he was still at school. Trained by Gustaf Gründgens (and others) at the Bonn Theater School, by 1951 he was well on the way to establishing himself as a stage actor.

In 1954 Hoegen took a major part in Charley's Aunt alongside the siblings Willy and Lucy Millowitsch. The production, at the Millowitsch Theatre in Cologne, was an early example of a stage production shown on German television.

"I would say that women drive more responsibly than men.""Ich würde sagen: Frauen fahren verantwortungsvoller als Männer."

Hoegen also featured as a voice artist for the seven part mini-series Journal 1870/71 (1970) which presented the Franco-Prussian War in the style of twentieth century news reportings, and for the Die Harald Schmidt Show (television talk show). In 1973 he was the voice on the radio in the disaster movie.

At five in the morning on 1 April 1995 Heugen featured as moderator at the launch of the new popular music channel, 1LIVE. He worked for Turkish State Radio during the mid-1990s on the German language "Tourist Magazine" programme, transmitted on the broadcaster's European service. It was in 1996 that the journalist Reinhard Lüke, while discussing the fact that Hoegen was still regularly appearing on television despite being well beyond normal retirement age, described him as "the man who for some unfathomable reason is always smiling" ("... den Mann, der aus unerfindlichen Gründen immer lächelt").

Since 1976 Hoegen has lived in Rösrath, just outside Cologne. He remained involved for many years with Radio Andernach, the official radio station for military personnel. He used the voice he had used for "Der 7. Sinn" to provide occasional "conduct warnings" inserted between the regular programming.

After 2011 Egon Hoegen had to use a wheel chair to get around in his home. He admitted to an interviewer in 2014 that there had been a number of collisions. "But I never had a car crash". It was clear that he set great store by his accident-free record as a car driver.

Awards and honours

Order of Merit Cross of Honour of traffic training ("Ehrenkreuz der Verkehrswacht")