As only became known on Tuesday, he died on Friday at the age of 81 from pancreatic cancer. According to his assistant, he died peacefully surrounded by family at his home in Brentwood, a part of Los Angeles. Petersen directed Hollywood successes such as “Das Boot”, “Outbreak” and “Air Force One”.
Wolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941 in the East Frisian town of Emden as the son of a ship entrepreneur and later grew up in Hamburg. He was one of the first to graduate from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. From 1971 the gifted man worked for television and shot six episodes of “Tatort” for NDR, among other things. There he proved his talent for talent. In 1977 he brought Nastassja Kinski in front of the camera for the “Tatort” thriller “Reifezeugnis” and made the young actress famous almost overnight. Petersen became a taboo breaker with the drama “The Consequence”, which is about homosexual love.
Breakthrough with “The Boat”
In the early 1980s, he filmed the successful novel “Das Boot” by Lothar-Günther Buchheim. The lavishly shot war film starring Jürgen Prochnow and Herbert Grönemeyer paved Petersen’s way to Hollywood. “Six Oscar nominations for a German film, that was a great thing,” he modestly looked back on 1983. Petersen, then in his early 40s, was nominated for directing and adapted screenplay, plus camera, editing, sound and sound editing. In the end, “Gandhi”, directed by Richard Attenborough, was the big winner.
After the success of “The Neverending Story” (1984), the director moved to Los Angeles with his wife Maria. There he brought in such Hollywood greats as Clint Eastwood (“In the Line of Fire”), Dustin Hoffman (“Outbreak”), Harrison Ford (“Air Force One”), George Clooney (“The Tempest”) and Brad Pitt ( “Troy”) in front of the camera.
Petersen returned to his German homeland in 2016 for a remake of his old TV comedy “Four Against the Bank” from the 1970s. The brisk gangster comedy with Til Schweiger, Matthias Schweighöfer and Jan Josef Liefers was to be his last film.
Source: Nachrichten
