Film and television actor Christian Oliver, his two children and a pilot died this Thursday when the small plane in which they were traveling crashed during a flight to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, police reported.
Mr. Oliver, 51, who appeared in “The Good German,” “Speed Racer” and the TV series “Saved by The Bell: The New Class,” and his daughters were the only passengers on the plane single engine traveling from Bequia. an island in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, when it crashed into the sea at noon, the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police said in a statement Thursday.
In addition to Mr. Oliver and his daughters, Madita Klepser, 10, and Annik Klepser, 12, the pilot, Robert Sachs, also died, police said. Fishermen and divers recovered the bodies and handed them over to the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Coast Guard, police said in a statement Friday.
The plane “experienced difficulties and fell into the ocean” shortly after taking off from JF Mitchell Airport in Bequia, police said. There was no further information about the cause of the crash, which is under investigation, they said.
Oliver was born in Germany and held dual citizenship there and in the United States, his Berlin-based agent, Caprice Crawford, said in an email Friday. He used the name Christian Oliver in his professional work instead of his full name, Christian Oliver Klepser, and divided his time between Los Angeles and his home country, he said.
Oliver worked with Steven Soderbergh in the 2006 film “The Good German,” with a cast that included George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. His other projects included a role in “Valkyrie” with Tom Cruise in 2008 and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in 2023, for which he provided voices.
He had just finished filming a new movie, “Forever Hold Your Peace,” and posted a photo from the set on social media about a week ago.
Earlier this week, Oliver posted his latest photo “from somewhere in paradise.”
Oliver was co-producing “Forever Hold Your Peace,” a story about marriage fraud, with director Nick Lyon. Lyon said in an interview Friday that Oliver had texted him Thursday morning about his plan to return to the United States to work on a scene on Friday.
“It was a big project for us,” said Lyon, who had also worked with Oliver on “Hercules Reborn” in 2014. “We had talked about it for years.”
