Biography:

Jörg Gudzuhn was born in Seilerhof, Germany, on March 23, 1945. He studied acting at the Ernst Buch Schauspielschule in East Berlin from 1966 to 1970. His first engagements were at theaters in Karl Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz) and Potsdam.

Gudzuhn had a long, successful career as a theater actor. From 1974 to 1976, he performed at the Hans Otto Theater in Postdam, before joining the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, where he was acclaimed for his leading roles in plays such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (dir. Rolf Winkelgrund) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Thomas Langhoff). In 1987, he joined the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, where audiences celebrated his performances in King Oedipus and Othello (dir. Alexander Lang) and Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, dir. Friedo Solter). From 2001 to 2010, Gudzuhn played a soccer coach in Leben bis Männer (Life Up to the Men’s League, dir. Peter Ensikat), written by Thomas Brussig, a thrilling and grotesque one-man play that he performed over one hundred times. His 2010 performance as a successful psychotherapist in Oliver Bukowski’s monolog Der Heiler (The Healer, dir. Piet Drescher) was his last role at the Deutsches Theater, where he had been for 23 years. He acted on stage one more time—in Ein bisschen Ruhe vor dem Sturm (Some Quiet before the Storm, dir. Guntbert Warns) at the Berlin Renaissance Theater—before retiring from the theater in 2012.

Beside his theater work, Gudzuhn is an important film actor. He appeared in many East German film productions. After his supporting role in Rainer Simon’s Till Eulenspiegel, the director cast him in the leading role in Das Luftschiff as Franz Xaver Stannebein, an obsessive inventor who does not realize when he is being used by Nazi officials. Gudzuhn also played a widower in Lothar Warneke’s love story Eine sonderbare Liebe and a passionate walker who suddenly owns two cars in Fahrschule (dir. Bernhard Stephan). His performance as the drug-addicted German author Hans Fallada, in Roland Gräf’s Fallada – Letztes Kapitel, brought him international recognition, and he was awarded the Silver Hugo for Best Actor at the 1989 Chicago International Film Festival. After the Wall came down, Gudzuhn continued working in cinema and television, creating an extensive body of film characters. He worked with many well-known actors in Heiner Carow’s Verfehlung, a East-West German love story set before the Wende, sharing the screen with Angelica Domröse and Gottfried John.

Gudzuhn’s television work, starting in the early 1970s, has included many movies and series, including the popular German TV series Liebling Kreuzberg and, more recently, the crime series Alles Klara. From 1998 to 2007, television audiences saw him as Inspector Joe Hoffer in over seventy episodes of the crime series Der letzte Zeuge. In 2000, he was nominated for the German Television Award for this role. Gudzuhn also played in Frank Beyer’s TV production Ende der Unschuld, about a German physicist and the development of a nuclear bomb. In recent years, Gudzuhn showed his comedic talent in several films, including Jan Georg Schütte’s funny and entertaining tour de force Altersglühen – Speed Dating für Senioren, featuring a first-rate cast including famous German actors such as Mario Adorf, Michael Gwisdek, Senta Berger and Matthias Habich.

Jörg Gudzuhn, who has also given his remarkable voice to many audio books and plays and often goes on reading tours, lives in Berlin.

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