German-American film director Wolfgang Petersen passed away at the age of 81. He was known as one of the best action directors of recent decades, with films like Das Boot, The NeverEnding Story, and Air Force One.
Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in the city of Emden in northwest Germany. He grew up as a young boy in post-WWII Germany and went on to direct plays at the famous Ernst Deutsch Theater in the 1960s. From 1966-1970, he attended the Film and Television Academy in Berlin, and after graduating he got work on the popular TV series Tatort (“Crime Scene”).
According to Deadline, Petersen died in his home Friday from pancreatic cancer. He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Maria Antoinette, his son Daniel, and two grandchildren. The young artist’s first feature film was the psychological thriller One or the Other of Us in 1974, which won two major German film awards. His second film, Das Boot (“The Boat”) in 1981, was an international sensation that received six Academy Award nominations and is still regarded as one of the best war films ever made. The film depicts the wartime experiences of a German U-Boat crew in WWII who are disillusioned with the Nazi Party but must nonetheless carry on the business of the war.
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With Das Boot, Petersen demonstrated his ability to masterfully handle both technically challenging action sequences but also smaller emotional moments of character drama, a skill that would eventually make him one of the most in-demand directors of his time. After the success of Das Boot, Petersen attempted to enter the Hollywood market with his first English-language film, the now beloved fantasy film The NeverEnding Story. With a budget of around $26 million, it was the most expensive film ever produced outside the United States or the Soviet Union at the time, with a budget twice the size of his previous war epic.
Petersen was indeed able to enter Hollywood, but his first decade in the industry only produced two duds, 1985’s Enemy Mine and 1991’s Shattered. In 1993, however, he hit his stride with In the Line of Fire. The political thriller stars Clint Eastwood as a secret service agent who must stop a former CIA operative (played by John Malkovich) from assassinating the president. The critical and commercial success of In the Line of Fire, which even included three Academy Award nominations, cemented Petersen’s place as one of the preeminent directors of action thrillers.
He followed this up with a series of major successes that helped define a generation of action cinema and saw him work with some of the biggest names in the world. These include the global pandemic film Outbreak in 1995, the Harrison Ford action thriller Air Force One in 1997, the disaster film The Perfect Storm in 2000, the Homeric war film Troy in 2004, and the cruise ship disaster film Poseidon in 2006. His final film, the crime comedy Vier gegen die Bank ("Four Against the Bank") in 2016, saw him work in the German language for the first time since Das Boot almost 40 years earlier.
Source: Deadline