The bad boy of German cinema who ‘wanted to be Marilyn Monroe’

Jane Fonda’s telephone manner was nothing if not imperious. ‘This is Jane Fonda herself,’ she said one spring morning in 1982, in a transatlantic call from Hollywood to Cannes. The German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was so tickled that for days afterwards he took to answering every phone call in English with: ‘This is Fassbinder himself.’

It was the meeting of opposites. She was Hollywood royalty, Henry’s daughter, sexy star of Barbarella and double Oscar winner, poised to release the first of her series of workout videos that would in the next 13 years sell 17 million copies. By contrast, Fassbinder probably didn’t even own a pair of leg-warmers. He was, as Ian Penman reports in this slender love letter to his oversized, cocaine-addled hero, ‘the unregenerate opposite of a certain micro-fascist 1980s gym/body culture: 60-80 cigs a day; big white steins of Bavarian beer; big plates of his favourite calorific German food’.