Daniel César Martín Brühl González Domingo is a Spanish-born German actor.
Brühl began acting at a young age and made his first steps 1995 as street kid Benji in the soap opera Forbidden Love. His international breakthrough role came in 2003 as Alex Kerner in the Golden Globe-nominated film Good Bye Lenin!, which reached an estimated six million cinema-goers worldwide.
In 2003, Brühl won the European Film Academy award trophies for Best Actor for the role.
Brühl made his English-speaking film debut in 2004's Ladies in Lavender, starring alongside British acting legends Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The same year, he won the People's Choice trophy for Best Actor in the same award-giving body for the film Love in Thoughts while at the same time, he was nominated for Best Actor for The Edukators. Brühl featured as Lieutenant Horstmayer, a central character in the 2005 film Joyeux Noë.
In June 2006, he made a cameo appearance in Two Days in Paris, a romantic comedy film which was directed by French actress Julie Delpy. In September 2006, his Cannes-nominated film Salvador premiered in Spain. In the film, he played Salvador Puig Antich, a Catalan anarchist executed during the Franco era. In 2007 he appeared in a small role in the film The Bourne Ultimatum.
He was in Krabat, based on a popular German children's story, which premiered in German cinemas in October 2008. He played the role of Frederik Zoller, a Nazi gloryhound war hero in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, starring Brad Pitt, which premiered at Cannes 2009. He and his co-stars won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
The son of German stage director Hanno Brühl and a Spanish professor mother. He also has a brother and a sister. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where he grew up and attended the Dreikönigsgymnasium. Raised in a fully bilingual home, he speaks German, Spanish, English, French and Catalan. In 2006, Brühl separated from his long-time girlfriend, actress Jessica Schwarz, to whom he was engaged.