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Ulrich Muhe: Lives of Others Star Dies at 53
Ulrich Muhe, the star of the Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others, has died of stomach cancer. He was 53, and was suffering from the disease when he attended this year's Oscar ceremony. I sat next to him at a dinner thrown by Sony Pictures Classics at September's Toronto International Film Festival. As an East German, his English was not fluent, but we did fine. He was sensitive, sweet, lovely. He lived through many of the things that the movie depicts, and when he was a young man, was even posted as sentry guard at the Berlin Wall, a duty he hated.
Here's the story I did on The Lives of Others:
Shot in 38 days, the film stars top East German theater actor Ulrich Muhe as the Stasi listener who is changed by what he learns about relationships, art, love, deception, corruption, power and betrayal. According to Henckel von Donnersmarck, Muhe was one of the first East Germans to claim his own 500-page Stasi file, and the actor learned that he had been under tight Stasi surveillance from the time he was in high school."They knew he was going to be a big star before he knew it," Henckel von Donnersmarck says. "When he did military service, they positioned him on the Berlin Wall with orders to shoot. He collapsed on duty with stomach ulcers. They treated him, released him, and threatened him. He found out that his wife, a famous actress, was a Stasi informant. Playing the part was a journey of self-discovery for him."
What a loss. Did those stomach ulcers lead to the cancer that killed him?
[Photo: Sony Pictures Classics; Jeffrey Wells]
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