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 traveling from Bequia, Royal an island off St. Vincent and the Grenadines when it crashed into the sea around noon, the St. Vincent and the Grenadines police force said in a statement Thursday.
In addition to Mr. Oliver and his daughters, Madita Klepser, 10, and Annique Klepser, 12, the pilot, Robert Sachs, was also killed, police said. Police said in a statement Friday that fishermen and divers recovered the bodies and handed them over to the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Coast Guard.
Police said the plane “encountered difficulties and fell into the sea” shortly after taking off from JF Mitchell Airport in Bequia. He said there was no further information on the cause of the accident, which was being investigated.
Mr. Oliver was born in Germany and has dual citizenship there and the United States, Caprice Crawford, his agent in Berlin, said in an email on Friday. That said, he used the name Christian Oliver rather than his full name Christian Oliver Klepser in his professional work and divided his time between Los Angeles and his home country.
Mr. Oliver worked with Steven Soderbergh on the 2006 film “The Good German,” which starred George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Her other projects include “Valkyrie” with Tom Cruise in 2008 and a role in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in 2023, for which she provided voice-overs.
She recently finished shooting a new movie, “Forever Hold Your Peace,” and posted a photo from the set on social media about a week ago.
Earlier this week, Mr Oliver posted his last photo “from somewhere in heaven”.
Mr. Oliver was a co-producer with director Nick Lyons on “Forever Hold Your Peace,” a story about marriage fraud. Mr. Lyons said in an interview Friday that Mr. Oliver had sent him a message Thursday morning informing him of his plans to return to the United States to work on a scene on Friday.
“This was a big project for us,” said Mr. Lyons, who also worked with Mr. Oliver on “Hercules Reborn” in 2014. “We talked about it for years.”
