known for his role as the gossip columnist 'Baby' Schimmerlos (roughly 'Baby Clueless') in the television series Kir Royal. His income from acting made writing without financial worries possible. From 1992 to 2005, Kroetz was married to the actress Marie-Theres Relin. They have three children. As of 2011, Kroetz lived in the Chiemgau and on Tenerife. Some of Kroetz's plays have also been translated into French and performed in France. Style According to Holmberg, critics "refer to Mr. Kroetz's plays as constituting a drama of the inarticulate. The hallmark of his style is to draw characters unable to find the half-word they need to express sorrow or rage." The early plays of Kroetz also end violently. Mel Gussow describes Kroetz as reliant on words rather than images, and quotes the playwright as having been disturbed by the "garrulity" of most theater of the same time. Kroetz has also argued, "A dramatist must be tough on his characters. Sentimentality is a trap, and it's tempting because audiences love sentimental plays." The extreme naturalism of Request Concert has led to retrospective comparisons of it with Chantal Akerman's film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and also with Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother (1983). Gautam Dasgupta has compared him to David Storey and Rainer W. Fassbinder, and also stated that his plays are "structured around cliches in the manner of Ionesco". Tom Fool has been compared to Harold Pinter's play The Homecoming for its depiction of a decomposing family. Susan L. Cocalis writes that early on Kroetz does not give readers a way to "locate the events on stage in a hypothetical framework and thus gain some distance to the action. He does not even bother to supply any discernible criteria for identifying the good and the evil, for in these plays a just order of the universe [...] simply does not exist." She also sees Kroetz as implying that the material interests of the family unit determine the code of normative sexuality. These plays have been described as impacting audiences primarily through compassion, and after 1972 he moved to a more analytical form of political drama about broader economic issues. Kroetz has referred to the early works as "descriptive realism" and the later works as "analytic realism" or "engaged realism". Sterntaler and Heimat include film clips of workplaces, and socially critical songs by workers. According to Craig Decker, Kroetz in