Film and television actor Christian Oliver, his two children and a pilot died Thursday when the small plane they were traveling in crashed during a flight to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, police said.
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 single-engine plane on the trip from Bequia, island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, when it crashed into the sea at midday, the Royal St. Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force said in a statement on Thursday.
In addition to Mr. Oliver and his daughters Madita Klepser, 10, and Annik Klepser, 12, pilot Robert Sachs was also killed, 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 difficulty and crashed into the ocean” shortly after taking off from Bequia’s JF Mitchell Airport, police said. There is no further information on the causes of the accident, which are under investigation.
Mr. Oliver was born in Germany and had dual citizenship there and in the United States, his agent in Berlin, Caprice Crawford, said in an email on Friday. He used the name Christian Oliver in his professional work rather than his full name, Christian Oliver Klepser, and split his time between Los Angeles and his home state, she 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 Quadrant of Destiny,” in 2023, for which he provided the voice.
He had just finished shooting a new film, “Forever Hold Your Peace”, and had published a photograph from the set means of social communication about a week ago.
Earlier this week, Mr. Oliver has published his latest photograph “somewhere in heaven.”
Mr. Oliver was co-producing “Forever Hold Your Peace,” a story about marriage fraud, with director Nick Lyon. Mr. Lyon said in an interview on Friday that Mr. 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 also worked with Oliver on “Hercules Reborn” in 2014. “We had been talking about it for years.”