Biography:

Ulrich Thein was born in Braunschweig on April 7, 1930. After graduating from high school, he studied music and took acting lessons. To finance his studies, he worked as a bar musician and boxer. 

Thein’s debut as an actor was at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, before he moved to East Berlin in 1951. There, at the age of only 21, he became the youngest member of the prestigious Deutsches Theater, where he was under contract until 1963. Besides performing on stage, he also directed plays at theaters in Senftenberg, Halle and Berlin in the 1950s and ‘60s.

In 1952, director Martin Hellberg cast Thein in a supporting role in the DEFA production Geheimakten Solvay, a story about postwar industrial sabotage. After he played in Gerhard Klein’s children’s crime story, Alarm im Zirkus—the first film in the director’s Berlin series—Klein engaged Thein for the male lead in Eine Berliner Romanze, in which he plays an unemployed West Berlin worker in love with a girl from East Berlin. The film’s frank images of youthful dreams and longings found little support among East German officials, who thought it encouraged East Germans to search for adventure in West Germany. The film is now considered one of the most accurate portrayals of Cold War Berlin’s youth scene during the 1950s and was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1991 and 2006. 

Thein appeared regularly in DEFA films, working with well-known directors such as Kurt Maetzig, Günter Reisch, Konrad Wolf, Frank Vogel, Richard Groschopp and Frank Beyer. Beyer cast him in the Spanish Civil War story Fünf Patronenhülsen and in Königskinder; his performance as a young member of the SA who defects to the Red Army in the latter film was one of the most important roles of his career. He is also remembered as detective Czernik in Die Glatzkopfbande, a film about hooligans in the GDR. Thein was awarded Best Actor at the 1979 Moscow International Film Festival for his performance as an inventive car mechanic and spare parts dealer in Günter Reisch’s comedy Anton der Zauberer. He also became well-known as a television actor in the early 1980s, playing in such roles as the church reformer Martin Luther and the composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

As of the early 1960s, Thein also worked as a director and scriptwriter. His directorial debut was the 2-part television production Der andere neben dir, a story about two doctors who discover they have a connection from the Nazi period, featuring Erwin Geschonneck and Armin Mueller-Stahl in leading roles. Critics praised Thein’s literary adaptation Mitten im kalten Winter, a humorous and shy love story set in winter 1942. Thein not only became one of the most successful East German television directors, but he also directed DEFA movies for the cinema screen, including Dach überm Kopf, a love story between a cook who tries to change her life and a life-affirming construction worker, and the literary adaptation Romanze mit Amélie, nominated for a Golden Bear at the 1982 Berlin International Film Festival. He made one of his last TV productions at the beginning of the 1990s: the 27-part series Agentur Herz, about six people who lose their jobs during German unification and look for new professional opportunities. 

Ulrich Thein died in Berlin on June 21, 1995. His papers are archived at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin

Festivals & Awards:

Bibliography & More:

Räder, Andy. Poesie des Alltäglichen. Ulrich Theins Regiearbeiten für das Fernsehen der DDR (1963‐1976). Wiesbaden: Springer Nature, 2019.