Klaus Kinski’s daughter claims abuse

The daughter of award-winning German actor Klaus Kinski has accused her late father of sexually abusing her as a child, breaking her silence more than 20 years after his death. Kinski – who starred in director Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and once played the bad guy in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western – is known as an eccentric and volatile legend of German cinema. But in a book to be published this month, his daughter Pola Kinski casts a far darker light on the enfant terrible who was notorious for flying into fits of rage on set and in interviews. “My father sexually abused me during my childhood,” his 60-year-old daughter, a former stage actress, told DPA ahead of the publication of the book entitled Child’s Mouth. “He started touching me and to open-mouth kiss me when I was very young, about five or six years old. I had to keep quiet because he threatened me. And I was dependent on him and his affection.” Kinski won multiple cinema awards and the cult around him has only grown since his 1991 death at age 65 following a heart attack. “I wrote the book because I can’t stand anymore how a man whose halo is growing year after year is being glorified like this,” said his daughter. “I wanted to make clear who this man really was.” She said she had no idea whether any of the other children from her father’s three marriages, which include her half-sister the actress Nastassja Kinski, were also abused.