Photo: Edmond Frederik, some rework done by jha / CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Ulrich Muhe gave one of the great screen performances of this century and barely got to enjoy it. As the Stasi captain in The Lives of Others, he made surveillance itself feel like a moral crisis, all interior, almost no big gestures. The film won the foreign-language Oscar and he took the European Film Award for Best Actor. The painful coda is that he died of stomach cancer in 2007, the year after that triumph, at only 54. Knowing he had lived under the real East German system gives his quiet, watchful Wiesler a weight no amount of acting technique alone could fake. A haunting talent, gone far too soon.
Overview
Friedrich Hans Ulrich Mühe (German pronunciation: [ˈʊlʁɪç ˈmyːə] ; 20 June 1953 – 22 July 2007) was a German film, television and theatre actor. He played the role of Hauptmann (Captain) Gerd Wiesler in the Oscar-winning film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), for which he received the gold award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, at the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Awards); and t…
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Ulrich Mühe
- Name (Japanese)
- ウルリッヒ・ミューエ
- Reading
- うるりっひ・みゅーえ
- Born
- June 20, 1953 – July 22, 2007
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Gemini / Snake
- Origin
- Grimma, Saxony, Germany
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- theatre director / stage actor / film actor / television actor / speaker
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- University of Music and Theatre Leipzig
Awards & achievements
- Kainz Medal
- 2005 Bavarian TV Awards
- 2006 European Film Award for Best Actor
- 2000 Berliner Bär
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Theatre director — see all → · Stage actor — see all → · More people from Germany →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.