Ulrich Mühe

in Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, photographed in July 1999. The son of a furrier, Mühe was born on 20 June 1953 in Grimma, Bezirk Leipzig (part of present-day Saxony), in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). After leaving school, he trained as a construction worker, then did compulsory military service in the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army) as a border guard at the Berlin Wall. He was relieved of duty after contracting stomach ulcers; possibly due to stress, according to observers, and also suggested that it marked the beginnings of the stomach cancer that would eventually lead to his death. He then turned to acting, and studied at the Theaterhochschule "Hans Otto" Leipzig from 1975 to 1979. He appeared in his first professional stage role in 1979, as Lyngstrand in Ibsen's Fruen fra havet (The Lady from the Sea) at the Städtisches Theater in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). He followed this by appearing in a production of Macbeth by playwright and director Heiner Müller at the Volksbühne in East Berlin. == Career ==

's Ghosts on 18 November 1983 in the Kammerspiele (Chamber Play Theatre) of the Deutsches Theater with, from left, Inge Keller as Mrs. Alving, Mühe as her son Osvald, and Simone von Zglinicki as the maid Regine Engstrand In 1983, at Müller's invitation he joined the ensemble of East Berlin's Deutsches Theater, and became its star due to his versatility in comic and serious roles, appearing in productions such as Goethe's Egmont (1986), Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Lessing's Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1988). On screen, he co-starred with his second wife Jenny Gröllmann in Herman Zschoche's film '' (Half of Life'', 1984) about the German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). and showed his more serious side in Michael Haneke's ''Benny's Video (1992), Das Schloss (The Castle'', 1996) (an adaptation of Kafka's The Castle (1922)) and Funny Games (1997). In the latter film, Mühe and his third wife Susanne Lothar played a husband and wife held captive in their holiday cabin by two psychotic young men who force them to play sadistic "games" with one another. In the 2000s, Mühe played Nazis in a sequence of films. He portrayed Joseph Goebbels in Goebbels und Geduldig (Goebbels and Geduldig, 2001); Dr. Josef Mengele in Amen. (2002), a film by Costa Gavras; and was to have played Klaus Barbie in an upcoming feature. His last film was the comedy Mein Führer - Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler, 2007), in which he played Prof. Adolf Israel Grünbaum, an actor hired to give Hitler lessons. In 2006, he appeared at the Barbican Arts Centre in London in Zerbombt, Thomas Ostermeier's German production of Sarah Kane's Blasted, playing a middle-aged journalist whose encounter with a young girl leads to pandemonium in a Leeds hotel room. Mühe was known in Germany for playing the brilliant but eccentric pathologist Dr. Robert Kolmaar in 73 episodes of the forensic crime serial Der letzte Zeuge (The Last Witness, 1998-2007), for which he was awarded the prize for Beste/r Schauspieler/in in einer Serie (Best Actor or Actress in a TV Series) at the Deutscher Fernsehpreis (German Television Awards) in 2005. == The Lives of Others, and later life ==

(The Lives of Others'', 2006). Curiously, events in Mühe's own life were mirrored by the storyline of the film. To English-speaking audiences, Mühe was probably best known for portraying Hauptmann (Captain) Gerd Wiesler in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007. The film is set in the mid-1980s, and Wiesler is a Stasi agent who is assigned to bug and conduct surveillance of the apartment of an East German playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his girlfriend, the actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). However, he becomes disillusioned about the necessity of monitoring the couple for national security reasons after discovering that the government minister who ordered the surveillance did so for sexual rather than political motives. Gradually, Wiesler's heart moves from contempt and envy to compassion. On 25 July 2007, he was buried in his mother's village of Walbeck in the Landkreis (rural district) of Börde, Saxony-Anhalt. == Personal life ==

Mühe was married three times. He was first married to dramaturge Annegret Hahn; the couple had two sons: Andreas, a Berlin-based photographer, and Konrad, a painter. His second marriage was in 1984 to the actress Jenny Gröllmann, after they fell in love while acting together , with actor Daniel Brühl at the première of their film Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken (Love in Thoughts, 2004) After German reunification, Mühe allegedly discovered evidence in his Stasi file that he had been under surveillance not only by four of his fellow actors in the East Berlin theatre, but also by his wife Gröllmann. The file held detailed records of meetings that Gröllmann, who was registered as an "Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (unofficial collaborator), had with her controller from 1979 to 1989. This mirrored the plot of Das Leben der Anderen as in the film pressure exerted by the Stasi on the playwright's girlfriend makes her betray him as the author of an exposé of covered-up GDR suicide rates. Mühe and Gröllmann divorced in 1990. which deals with a couple's troubled relationship. However, Lothar, who died in 2012, launched a lawsuit to block the film from release for nearly three years, apparently because she felt that it would cast the couple in a bad light. == Awards ==

In addition to the awards mentioned elsewhere in this article, Mühe was conferred the following awards: • 1990 - The Chaplin Shoe, the Deutscher Darstellerpreis (German Actor Award) of the Bundesverbandes der Fernseh- und Filmregisseure in Deutschland eV (Federal Association of Television and Film Directors in Germany). • 1991 - The Gertrud-Eysoldt-Ring (Gertrud Eysoldt Ring) • 1992 - The Bambi • 1994 - The Kainz-Medaille (Kainz Medal) • 2006 - The Bernhard-Wicki-Filmpreis (Bernhard Wicki Film Award) • The Helene-Weigel-Medaille (Helene Weigel Medal) • The prize of the critics of the Berliner Zeitung == Filmography ==

Film Television Some information in this table was obtained from . Retrieved on 23 September 2007. Theater Audio books == References ==