Brad Pitt, Rene Russo, Harrison Ford, and Dustin Hoffman were among the Hollywood celebrities who appeared in Petersen’s films.
The 81-year-old German director Wolfgang Petersen, known for the submarine epic Das Boot and Air Force One, has passed away.
The filmmaker died of pancreatic cancer on Friday at his home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, according to his representative Michelle Bega.
Das Boot, published in 1982, depicted the terrible claustrophobia of life aboard a doomed German U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic, with Jurgen Prochnow as the commander.
The 149-minute anti-war masterwork was nominated for six Oscars and was the most expensive picture in German film history at the time.
Hollywood actors such as Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffman, Harrison Ford, and Rene Russo appeared in Petersen’s films.
Das Boot started Petersen’s career as a filmmaker in Hollywood, where he went on to become one of the leading directors of action-adventure films, including 1993’s In The Line Of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood as a secret service agent tasked with defending the president. The outbreak, a 1995 film based on the Ebola virus, starred Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, and Morgan Freeman.
In 1997’s Air Force One, Petersen returns to the presidency.
Harrison Ford portrayed a president who is compelled to combat terrorists who kidnap Air Force One. The film grossed $315 million (£260 million) at the worldwide box office.
Based on the true story of a Massachusetts fishing boat lost at sea, Petersen’s 2000 picture The Perfect Storm stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and a 100-foot computer-generated wave.
The film grossed $328.7 million on a budget of $120 million.
Peterson, who grew up on the northern coast of Germany, has always been fascinated by the ocean.
Petersen has also directed The NeverEnding Story and Troy, starring Brad Pitt.
Born in 1941, the director remembered running alongside American ships as they dropped supplies as a child.
Petersen, who began his career in theatre before enrolling at Berlin’s Film and Television Academy in the late 1960s, gravitated toward Hollywood pictures with unambiguous conflicts between good and evil in post-war Germany.
Initially, he was married to the German actress Ursula Sieg. When they separated in 1978, he married the German script supervisor and assistant director Maria-Antoinette Borgel.
Borgel, his son Daniel Petersen, and two grandkids survive him.
