Klaus Kinski's Life Hacks - 1. How To Soothe A Sore Throat

Does what it says etc.

You are Klaus Kinski, You wake one morning to find that you cannot breathe. The boil in your throat that you’ve refused to have treated is now so big that’s it’s suffocating you. You need treatment.

But you are Klaus Kinski - the most intense of all the intense actors and a man whose personal motto is “I am my own God, my own jury and my own executioner!” So although you visit the German embassy to get $5,000 to pay for an operation, you don’t see a doctor.

Instead, you tilt your head back, you grab hold of a foot-long butcher’s knife and you make like a sword swallower. With the boil burst, you vomit pus for a full minute. Then, with the $5,000 in hand, you head for the nearest car showroom.

To put all of this into some context, when Kinski stayed with director Werner Herzog, he raged for two days solid during which time he destroyed his host’s bathroom. With his bare hands. By the time the actor was through, the suite, recalls Herzog, could “be sieved through a tennis racket.”