Ben Becker turns 60: A life as a total work of art

To call Ben Becker (60) an actor is a little short-sighted. Rather, the man is an idiosyncratic work of art in which stage role and private person merge seamlessly. On his 60th birthday, the eternal punk is happy to still be among the living and confronts human transience in his latest solo show “Death Duel”.

Ben Becker earned his nickname “Big Ben” in the wild Berlin of the 1980s, where he made a name for himself as a young punk from a relevant artistic family, particularly through his pronounced cockiness and a certain penchant for rowdy performances. Even before he started his career as an actor, the self-confident bundle of energy with red hair was one of the most famous figures in the Berlin underground.

He was born on December 19, 1964 in Bremen as the son of the actors Monika Hansen (81) and Rolf Becker (89). After the marriage broke up, the mother moved with Ben and his younger sister Meret Becker (55) to Berlin, where they grew up with their foster father, the acting legend Otto Sander (1941-2013, “Der Himmel über Berlin”).

After completing secondary school with a bang, Ben Becker also decided to pursue a career in the arts, initially working as a stage hand at the Berlin Schaubühne and taking private acting lessons between 1985 and 1987. He then devoted himself primarily to theater in his first engagements at the Ernst Deutsch Theater in Hamburg and at the Staatstheater Stuttgart.

The charismatic young talent gained greater fame in the mid-1990s with his highly acclaimed roles in major cinema productions such as Joseph Vilsmaier’s (1939-2020) “Sleeping Brother” (1995) or the film biography “Comedian Harmonists” (1997). He was also regularly seen in crime film formats such as “Tatort”, “Ein Fall für zwei” and “Polizeiruf 110”.

At the first peak of his success, Ben Becker began to create his own projects in which he could let off steam in a more unconventional way and also be more of a focus. For example, with his first own theater production “Sid & Nancy” (1995), in which he portrayed the tragic love story of the Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (1957-1979), who died early, and his manic girlfriend Nancy Spungen (1958-1978) in the most punk way possible brought to the stage in a way. Or with his music project “Ben Becker & The Zero Tolerance Band”, with which he released several albums with titles like “And the head flies away silently” (1997) or “We take off” (2001).

Together with this band, he also dealt with biblical texts and figures in a monumental way for the first time, a topic that would not let him go in the years to come. In a spectacular three-hour solo performance with the Zero Tolerance Band and the Babelsberg Film Orchestra in 2007, he brought texts from the Old and New Testaments to the stage under the title “The Bible – A Spoken Symphony”. In the same year he also portrayed the reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) in the scenic television documentary “Martin Luther – Fight with the Devil”.

The fact that since then he has increasingly dealt with religious themes and the really big questions of life in large solo pieces is probably also related to his drug crash in 2007, which almost cost him his life. After ingesting an unspecified substance, he suffered respiratory arrest and had to be resuscitated.

From 2015 onwards, Becker caused a stir for several years with his production “I, Judas”. In the play he took on the role of the biblical traitor Judas, who delivered Jesus to the cross. Due to its great success, the eloquent solo performance was also released in cinemas as a film documentary in 2017.

Shortly before his 60th birthday, the actor launched another solo performance with a religious theme in September. In his production “Death Duel” he brings the last sermon of the English poet and preacher John Donne (1572-1631) to the stage, in which life is described as a duel with death. On Ben Becker’s website it says about this piece: “His text is an explosion. True, shocking, unsparing in its view of the transience of life and at the same time full of strength and hope that transcends death.”

Nevertheless, there is no need to worry that Becker will continue his career as a theatrical itinerant preacher and sink into seriousness. Quite the opposite: the actor has been appearing in the film produced by Warner TV since the end of 2023. With self-deprecating broad-leggedness, Becker plays a police officer out of time in his first leading role in a series, who, equipped with sheriff’s uniform and a big mouth, has to solve the murder of a drag queen.

In an interview with the “Frankfurter Rundschau”, the all-rounder also recently signaled a fundamental interest in embodying a “good ‘crime scene’ detective”. He would also “like to play the villain in ‘James Bond’.”