Screen and television actor. Born Götz Eick in then Steinwehr, Pomerania (Pommern), now belonging to Poland. After finishing school and a few months of music studies, he emigrated to New York in 1931 with a group of people around Eric Charell, a director and later author of successful revues and musicals in Berlin. There he first worked as a bar pianist, also composed his own songs, was a temporary production assistant for Irving Berlin and assistant director at the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles. He also drove trucks from the East Coast to the West Coast. In 1942, he landed the role of a lieutenant in the film version of John Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down." In Hollywood, he met director Billy Wilder again, who gave him the role of a German lieutenant in "Five Graves to Cairo." In 1943, he took U.S. citizenship and was also drafted into the American Army. After the war ended, he was assigned to Germany as a U.S. control officer for German film and remained head of the film section until 1948. During this time, van Eyck also appeared for the first time as an actor in a German production "Hallo Fräulein!" (1949, dir. Rudolf Jugert). Numerous roles in German, French, Italian and English films followed. From 1953 to 56 he was again in Hollywood, before finally settling in Paris and from 1960 in Switzerland. One of his best performances was in the role of Bimba, one of a group of daredevil truck drivers traversing an impenetrable South American jungle with a deadly load of nitroglycerin, in Henri-Georges Clouzot's high octane thriller "Le salaire de la peur" (1953). Other memorable roles he had in "Epilog" (1950, dir. Helmut Käutner), "The Rawhide Years" (1955, dir. Rudolph Maté), "Le feu aux poudres" (1957, dir. Henri Decoin), "The Snorkel" (1958, dir. Guy Green), "Das Mädchen Rosemarie" (1958), "Labyrinth" (1959, both dir. Rolf Thiele), "Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse" (1960, dir. Fritz Lang), "The Longest Day" (1962), "Kennwort...Reiher" (1963, dir. Jugert), "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965, dir. Martin Ritt), "Shalako" (1968, dir. Edward Dmytryk) and "The Bridge at Remagen" (1969). A truly international star, he died in a hospital in Männedorf, a suburb of Zürich, of an undiagnosed cancer, one day before his 56th birthday.