In 1963 René Steinke was born. When he was 14 he wanted to become an actor. But the road to this goal was long: an education as a technicus, a while in the army at the NVA (Nationale Volks Armee) and a year as an ambulance-driver at the Red Cross. After that he finally went to the drama school Ernst Busch in Berlin. There he has studied and he finished this study with succes. At the begin of the 1990s René became famous as an actor after he played several parts in the theatre. Now René has played in different television-series.

From the fourth season he playes the part of Tom Kranich in "Cobra 11". There he is the replacement of Mark Keller. As colleague of Semir Gerkhan he gets to deal with car-thiefs, pimps, black-mailers and murderers in the succesfull action-serie. For the actor the role of an highway-detective is a big exercise: "I have worked a lot for television, but a serie with weekly six million viewers (in Germany) is something very different." This means for René that he has to get up every morning at seven o'clock, because the shootings often start at nine o'clock.