Wolfgang Petersen died at 81, we owe him in particular the blockbusters Troy and Air Force One

The world of cinema has lost a prolific and recognized filmmaker. Wolfgang Petersen died on Friday August 12 at the age of 81 in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles from pancreatic cancer. He was one of the few foreign directors to break into Hollywood. Although he started his career in Germany, he moved to the United States after his film Das Boot was nominated for six Oscars. This film will remain the most important of his filmography. Wolfgang Petersen also prepared various versions of Das Boot over the next decade and a half. In 1985, German television broadcast a 300-minute version (twice as long as the theatrical release), which he claimed was closer to his original vision but commercially unfeasible at the time. In the United States, Wolfgang Petersen quickly became one of the most sought-after directors.

For five decades he oscillated between his native Germany and the United States, making 29 films in all, including many box office hits like the 1990s political thrillers In the Line of Fire with Clint Eastwood, and Air Force One with Harrison Ford. Wolfgang Petersena also made inroads into fantasy, with The Neverending Story, the ancient epic with Troy and science fiction. Born on March 14, 1941 in Emden, in northern Germany, the young Wolfgang Petersen already dreamed of America and American films that he regularly went to see at the cinema. “I discovered cinema at the age of 8 and I was immediately enthusiastic”he said in 1985. In the early 1960s he worked as an assistant director at the Junges Theater and later studied acting in Hamburg and Berlin before enrolling at the German Film Academy and of television.

Wolfgang Petersen: when was his last film?

At first very active in his native country, he then moved to the United States where he filmed movie stars like Brad Pitt, Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, George Clooney, Rene Russo, Glenn Close, Mark Wahlberg, Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman and Diane Lane. His last film was in 2016 when he directed Vier gegen die Bank, a remake of his 1976 feature film. It was then Wolfgang Petersen’s first German-language film since Das Boot a quarter of a century earlier. He was married to German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. He then married Maria-Antoinette Borgel, whom he had met on the set of Smog, where she worked as a screenwriter. The filmmaker leaves behind his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Daniel, filmmaker, and two grandchildren.

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