Ulrich Muhe

Only one day before his death, which occurred on Sunday, July 22, 2007, the actor Ulrich Mühe had announced that he had stomach cancer. Mühe was 54 years old and his recent role as a Stasi agent in The Lives of Others earned him the best actor award at the European Film Awards. His career began in the theater, at the Hans Otto school. His film debut was at the age of 30, and since then he has alternated his work in the world of celluloid and on television. In 1992 he was cast under the command of Michael Haneke in The Benny Video , where he played the father of a deranged boy who begins committing crimes and recording them on his camera. Five years later, Haneke counted on him again to star in the horror filmFunnyGames . Mühe played the husband and father of a family who is brutally tortured while spending some time off at her vacation home. The German did not drink alone, because his co-star was Susanne Lothar , his wife on screen and in real life. The trio Haneke, Mühe, Lothar, seemed to work, since they repeated immediately in The Castle (1997).

The work of this actor was developed in Germany, so it is difficult to find big names in Hollywood in his filmography. For this reason it is almost anecdotal that in 1999 he coincided with Dennis Hopper in the thriller The Sniper . It was in 2006 that he landed the role of Stasi agent for which he will always be remembered. The film about the control exercised by communist Germany over everything that could smack of subversive was all too familiar to Mühe. He was born in the German Democratic Republic, so the reality narrated on the tape was not strange to him. While in the lives of othershe was the government agent who spied on others, in his real life, Mühe was married for six years to Jenny Gröllmann, who secretly collaborated with the Stasi, as it became known with the arrival of reunification. Mühe’s wife was not professional, like the role of her husband in the film, but apparently she was quite skilled and efficient in providing the government with all kinds of data on her friends and relatives. While they were married, the actor never knew about the “hobby” of her wife, who worked hard so that her husband did not suspect anything of her, since he was a sworn enemy of the Stasi. A story that could well fit as a plot in a second part of The Lives of Others .

With a taste of newly achieved success, Mühe continued his career between film and television. He had recently shot Nemesis , a psychological thriller in which he returned to share the bill with his wife. The couple had two children, in addition to the young Anna Maria Mühe , daughter of the actor’s first relationship. The eldest daughter has continued with the career of her father, a man recognized in Germany who looked out on the world through the window of the lives of others.