Armin Mueller-Stahl

Biography

In December 2011 Armin Mueller-Stahl travelled to Sovetsk, in the Kaliningrad Region of Russia. He had last seen the town in 1938, when it was still called Tilsit and his family was moving away to Prenzlau. Now he was made an honorary citizen.

He was born on 17 December 1930 in Tilsit, East Prussia, the third of five children of a bank clerk. His mother came from a Baltic German family, and her father was a pastor in Tilsit. At home the family drew and made music together, and his father had once dreamed of the stage and acted at the town theatre. After 1938 they lived in Prenzlau. In 1948 Mueller-Stahl went to Berlin “with his violin case”, studied violin and musicology at the municipal conservatory, and in 1949 qualified as a music teacher.

Then he switched to the theatre. At first he was dismissed from acting classes for “lack of talent”, but in 1952, after a conversation with Helene Weigel, he received his first permanent engagement at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin. In 1954 he moved with the company to the Volksbühne, under Fritz Wisten, and played there for more than twenty years: Mercutio, Posa in “Don Carlos”, parts in “Emilia Galotti” and “Intrigue and Love”. By his own account, he owes his profession to Wisten.

He came to film in 1960, with a role in “Five Cartridges”, a film about the Spanish Civil War. There followed “Jacob the Liar”, “Her Third” and “Deadly Mistake”. Audiences voted him the best actor in East Germany five times in a row. From 1973 he played a state security officer in the television series “Das unsichtbare Visier”, conceived as an answer to the James Bond films. When its makers decided to give it a more political line, Mueller-Stahl left the project. At the end of 1976 he signed an open letter protesting the stripping of East German citizenship from the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, and for two and a half years he was offered almost no roles. He spent that time on his book “Verordneter Sonntag” (“Ordered Sunday”, 1981).

In 1980 he was allowed to leave for West Berlin. Here he went back to work: the male lead in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Lola” (1981), then “Veronika Voss”, Andrzej Wajda’s “A Love in Germany” and István Szabó’s “Colonel Redl”. He later said that he turned down the lead in the television series “Black Forest Clinic” because he did not want to be stuck as a television doctor.

In 1989, knowing hardly any English, he moved to the United States. In his American debut, Costa-Gavras’s “Music Box” (1989), he played a Hungarian émigré accused of war crimes; by his own account, he learned his lines by ear, changing the intonation in every take. Then came “Avalon” (1990), Steven Soderbergh’s “Kafka” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth” (both 1991), in which he played an East German émigré, the taxi driver Helmut Grokenberger. For “Utz” he won the Silver Bear at the 1992 Berlin International Film Festival. In 1996 came “Shine”: his role as the father of the pianist David Helfgott brought him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. In the same year he directed his only film, “Conversation with the Beast”.

Later came “The X-Files” (1998), the television series “Die Manns”, in which he played Thomas Mann, and a part in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” (2007), for which he won a Genie Award, the Canadian film prize, in 2008. In 2011 he was given the Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin festival.

His last film role was a priest in Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups” (2015).

He began drawing long ago but started to exhibit only in 2001: the first show was at the Film Museum in Potsdam, followed by Lübeck, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Solingen and other towns. The drawings came out of the pauses between takes. “When you draw, you are your own director,” he said. He is interested in faces that show the daily struggle to survive. In 2007 he designed the spines of a special edition of the Brockhaus encyclopedia with lithographs. Besides drawing he writes prose and poetry (“Unterwegs nach Hause”, “Hannah”, “Die Jahre werden schneller”).