Wolfgang Petersen, a German film director, producer and screenwriter passed away on August 12, 2022, at his Brentwood residence from pancreatic cancer. He was 81.
Wolfgang Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Emden, Germany. His father was a naval lieutenant in World War II who later worked for a shipping company in Hamburg.
After graduating from high school, Petersen was exempted from compulsive military service due to spine curvature.
In the early 1960s, he worked as an assistant director at the Junges Theater (now the Ernst Deutsch Theater) in Hamburg. After studying theater in Berlin and Hamburg, Petersen attended the Film and Television Academy in Berlin from 1966 and 1970.
Following his 1970 graduation film, “I Will Kill You, Wolf,” Petersen had an offer to direct the long-running German crime series “Tatort.”
Wolfgang Petersen’s first theatrical pic was One or the Other (1974), and he followed that with The Consequence in 1977, for which he also wrote the adapted screenplay.
He subsequently directed and wrote numerous films including Das Boot (1981), The NeverEnding Story (1984), Enemy Mine (1985), In the Line of Fire (1993), Outbreak (1995), Air Force One (1997), The Perfect Storm (2000), Troy (2004), and Poseidon (2006).
Petersen was nominated for six Academy Awards for the World War II submarine warfare film Das Boot (1981). Two of those went to Petersen for adapted screenplay and directing, and he also was nominated for a BAFTA Award and DGA Award.
Petersen was married to German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978.
He is survived by his second wife Maria-Antoinette Borgel, a German script supervisor and assistant director whom he married in 1978, a son by Sieg, writer-director, Daniel Petersen and two grandchildren.
His funeral arrangement is yet to be announced by the family.