The son of a famous conductor, Böhm started out as the elegant young lover of Arthur Maria Rabenalt's Alraune (1952) and in the film operetta Der unsterbliche Lump (1953). He featured in over thirty films during the following decade, still typecast as the stiff juvenile hero in Ernst Marischka's hugely popular Sissi trilogy (1955-57), leaving him with a serious image problem. Böhm attempted a change in British, French and American films, and succeeded almost too well as the self-conscious serial killer in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960). He subsequently appeared in the striptease thriller Too Hot to Handle (1959, UK), the lynch-law drama La Croix des vivants (1960, France), as a Nazi officer in Vincente Minnelli's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962, US) and as a sadistic agent in The Venetian Affair (1966, US). A second German career began in 1972, when Rainer Werner Fassbinder made full use of Böhm's by now many-layered star image, first as the worldly-wise Prussian councillor Wüllersdorf in Fontane Effi Briest / Effi Briest (1974), then as the sadistic husband in Martha (1974), the homosexual art dealer in Faustrecht der Freiheit / Fox and His Friends (1975), and finally the arrogant, middle-class communist Tillmann in Mutter Küsters Fahrt zum Himmel / Mother Kuster's Trip to Heaven (1976). Apart from occasional appearances on stage and television, Böhm has devoted much of the last fifteen years to promoting charities for starving children in Central Africa and Ethiopia.