German collector card by Kino.
West German autograph card.
A struggling student who blackmails his plagiarising professor
Jürgen Prochnow was born in Berlin in 1941. He was the son of telecommunications engineer Günter Prochnow and his wife Marga, and grew up in Düsseldorf after the family moved there in 1952. His older brother, Dieter Prochnow, is also an actor. Jürgen Prochnow attended the Jacobi Gymnasium and was already involved in amateur theatre groups whilst still at school. At his parents’ request, he initially began an apprenticeship as a bank clerk. Alongside this, he worked as an extra and lighting technician at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus. After completing his apprenticeship, he studied acting at the Folkwang University of the Arts from 1963 to 1966.
Prochnow received his first engagement at the Städtische Bühnen Osnabrück, where he worked from 1966 to 1968. Among other roles, he appeared in the operetta 'The Land of Smiles' and the fairy tale 'Peterchen’s Moon Journey'. Further engagements took him to the Theatre in Aachen, where he worked from 1968 to 1970, and to the Heidelberg City Theatre in 1971. From 1971 to 1976, he was a member of the ensemble at the Schauspielhaus Bochum under artistic director Peter Zadek. In the years that followed, he worked as a freelance artist and accepted guest engagements at various theatres, including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Düsseldorf.
From the 1970s onwards, Jürgen Prochnow appeared increasingly on television. He made his television debut in Unternehmer / Entrepreneur (Eberhard Itzenplitz, 1970) and his film debut in Zoff / The Hitch of It (Eberhard Pieper, 1971). Wolfgang Petersen directed him in the Tatort episode Jagdrevier (1973). Prochnow then starred as a struggling student who blackmails his plagiarising professor (Klaus Schwarzkopf) in Petersen’s first feature film, the psychological thriller Einer von uns beiden / One or the Other of Us (Wolfgang Petersen, 1974).
He then played the title role in the film Die Verrohung des Franz Blum / The Brutalisation of Franz Blum (Reinhard Hauff, 1974). He appeared as the terrorist Ludwig in the Heinrich Böll adaptation Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum / The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, 1975), featuring Angela Winkler as an innocent woman whose life is destroyed by the police and the tabloid press.
Further collaborations with Petersen followed with the television film Hans im Glück / Hans in Luck (Wolfgang Petersen, 1976) and the controversial, groundbreaking film Die Konsequenz / The Consequence (Wolfgang Petersen, 1977), in which Prochnow played a homosexual actor in prison who develops a friendship with the 16-year-old son (Ernst Hannawald) of a prison guard. The film had a pivotal role in West Germany in starting a dialogue on the topic of homosexuality.
Vintage photo. Jürgen Prochnow and Herbert Grönemeyer in Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981).
Vintage photo. Jürgen Prochnow in Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981).
The cool-headed and sympathetic U-boat Commander 'Der Alte'
In 1981, Jürgen Prochnow made his international breakthrough with the lead role of the cool-headed and sympathetic U-boat Commander 'Der Alte' ('Old Man') in the brilliant maritime war drama Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981). His character was based on Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, the commander of U-96 during the Second World War. The film depicts both the excitement of battle and the tedium of the fruitless hunt, and shows the men serving aboard U-boats as ordinary individuals with a desire to do their best for their comrades and their country.
Janet Maslin in The New York Times: "The captain of the U-boat is played by Jürgen Prochnow, a remarkable actor who has also worked with Mr. Petersen on four other films. Mr. Prochnow's sad, solemn face rarely changes, but his pale eyes are extraordinarily alive. As the captain, he becomes a source of spiritual strength for his crewmen, even though his own cynicism is readily apparent." Produced on a DM32 million budget (about $13 million in 1981, equivalent to ca. €48 million in 2026), the high production cost ranks it among the most expensive films in German cinema, but the film was a commercial success, grossing nearly $85 million worldwide (now ca. $313 million).
Jürgen Prochnow subsequently secured roles in many Hollywood productions. He played Duke Leto Atreides in the box office failure and cult film Dune (David Lynch, 1984), the villain Maxwell Dent opposite Eddie Murphy in the box office hit Beverly Hills Cop II (Tony Scott, 1987), and Charlie Dowd in Hurricane Smith (Colin Budds, 1990). Prochnow starred alongside Madonna in the erotic thriller Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993), and appeared in the Science Fiction film Judge Dredd (Danny Cannon, 1995) with Sylvester Stallone.
Prochnow took on the role of Major Müller in The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996) with Ralph Fiennes, and he played the Russian rebel general Ivan Radek in Wolfgang Petersen's Air Force One (1997). He also appeared in A Dry White Season (Euzhan Palcy, 1989) opposite Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando, In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994), and the Dan Brown thriller The Da Vinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006) starring Tom Hanks. In the eighth series of the TV hit 24 (2010), he played Sergei Bazhaev, the leader of an Eastern European criminal gang and the adversary of Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland).
Prochnow is also active as a voice actor and usually dubs his own roles into German himself and regularly dubs Sylvester Stallone. In the early 1980s, Prochnow was in a relationship with the Austrian actress Antonia Reininghaus. She fatally poisoned their 7-year-old daughter, Johanna, in 1987. Reininghaus subsequently attempted to take her own life. From 1982 to 1997, Prochnow was married to Isabel Goslar, daughter of the director Jürgen Goslar. The marriage produced two children: a daughter, Mona, and a son, Roman. From 2004 to 2014, he was married to the actress and director Birgit Stein. Stein died in 2018 in a motorcycle accident in Kanab, Utah. Prochnow has been married to the actress Verena Wengler since 2015. He lived in Los Angeles and Munich and has also been a US citizen since 2003. In April 2017, he moved back to Europe with his family. He lives in Berlin and on Lake Garda.
British poster postcard by Star-Graphics, London, no. S 105. Jürgen Prochnow on the German poster for Der Bulle & das Mädchen / The Cop and the Girl (Peter Keglevic, 1985). Caption: He achieved worldwide fame as a submarine captain: Jürgen Prochnow.
German autograph card.
German autograph card. Photo: Holger Peters.
Sources: Janet Maslin (The New York Times), I.S. Mowis (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch, German and English) and IMDb.
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