From his tortured childhood in the poverty of prewar Berlin - starving, stealing, perpetually frostbitten - his conscription, at age sixteen, into the German army in the last year of World War II, and on through his rise to international stardom as a film actor, Kinski carried with him a personal hell: an unendurable sense of isolation ameliorated only through acting and sex. Acting would raise him from squalid poverty to international celebrity. It would send him from. Old World Europe to fast-and-loose Hollywood, from the back lots of Hong Kong's movie factories to the deepest jungles of Africa. To maintain his lifestyle and satiate his creative needs, he appeared in more than 160 films, anything from schlock Hollywood comedies to classics such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. His Casanovian pursuit of sex, beginning as a child with his sister and on through countless liaisons - from Moroccan prostitutes to the rich and famous - is. Chronicled in graphic detail.