some sad news for fans of world cinema

 

Ulrich Mühe

Star of 'The Lives of Others'

Published: 26 July 2007 Independent

 

Ulrich Mühe, actor: born Grimma, East Germany 20 June 1953; three times married (five children); died Walbeck, Germany 22 July 2007.

 

The actor Ulrich Mühe was an emblematic figure in his native Germany. Nobody else brought to the stage and screen more conviction and charisma, intelligent charm and consummate artistry and his was a symbolic personal story of German reunification and the slowness of healing.

 

Mühe shot to stardom as the protagonist in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Academy Award-winning film Das Leben der Anderen, released internationally as The Lives of Others (2006). He became the "official face" of GDR history as the increasingly disillusioned Stasi colonel Wiesler, a role that forced him to confront once again a time he had left behind but that had come back to haunt him.

 

Born in 1953, the son of a tanner in the small town of Grimma in Saxony, then in the GDR, Mühe trained as a builder before being drafted into the Volksarmee and detailed to watch the Berlin Wall. In 1975 he began his theatre studies at the Hans Otto theatre academy in Leipzig and began his career with small parts in Karl-Marx-Stadt before being discovered by the leading director and playwright Heiner Müller and invited to join the ensemble of the Berliner Volksbühne.

 

Here the talented actor soon established a brilliant reputation with classics such as Goethe's Egmont (1986) and in the lead role of Heiner Müller's artistically daring Hamletmaschine ("Hamlet machine", 1989). "Theatre was the only place in the GDR where people weren't lied to," Mühe later remembered. "For us actors it was an island. We could dare to criticise." In a recent interview he was clear about this dichotomy: "Shakespeare was more than this smallish, pissy GDR. I wanted to leave it all behind me. I couldn't breathe."

 

In parallel to his stage career Mühe was increasingly in demand as a cinema actor, and he and the actress Jenny Gröllmann formed an iconic couple for a younger generation in East Germany. The relationship flowered off set, and the two were married in 1984. Mühe was also known for his political engagement, notably for his role in staging the 1989 street demonstrations preceding the opening of the inter-German borders. The reunification he had helped to initiate would make him a national and international star. The hit comedy Schtonk! (1991) brought him recognition as a comic actor; other films such as Michael Haneke's Das Schloss (The Castle, 1996) and Funny Games (1997) showed him in a more serious vein.

 

Mühe also reached a broad public in Germany as the intellectually dazzling but privately quixotic pathologist Robert Kolmaar in the forensic crime serial Der Letzte Zeuge (Last Witness, 1998-2007). With characteristic delight in acting and professional panache, he made the role his own, creating one of the most complex and sympathetic characters in German television. Commercial success, though, left him largely indifferent, and Mühe felt drawn back to more challenging stage work in Berlin, Vienna, and other cities.

 

With The Lives of Others Mühe's life changed radically, though only partly for the better. Globally acclaimed in 2006 for the role of a Stasi officer specialising in covert surveillance, the actor claimed that his former wife and erstwhile co-star Jenny Gröllmann had herself informed on him to the East German secret services, which held files of several hundred pages on the ideologically unreliable star.

 

Mühe mentioned this painful episode in a book and was sued by his former wife, who was by then herself seriously ill with cancer. The battle was fought publicly and acrimoniously; Gröllmann died in August 2006. Mühe was married three times, latterly to the actress Susanne Lothar with whom he had a son and daughter.

 

The Academy Awards burst into Mühe's personal confrontation with the past and saw him in Los Angeles participating in the ceremonies and holding the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, to which he had made an essential contribution. Media coverage showed the actor already frail, but thrilled and full of plans. He might live and work in California for a while, he mused.

 

But this was not to be. On his return home he was operated on for stomach cancer. This week the German newspaper Berliner Morgenblatt printed an interview in which he spoke about his illness for the first time. "Yes I am ill," he said, "but I hope to be better soon." Ulrich Mühe died suddenly, two days before the article appeared.

 

Philipp Blom

I've yet to see Lives of Others, though I've heard great things about it.

I've yet to see Lives of Others, though I've heard great things about it.

 

its excellent