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Director Wolfgang Petersen has died. Petersen, whose career included The Perfect Storm, Air Force One and Das Boot, was 81.
Deadline reports that Petersen died Friday, when he passed peacefully “in the arms of his wife of 50 years, Maria Antoinette,” after battling pancreatic cancer.
Petersen was born on March 14, 1941, in Germany, and began working in film and Tv in his 20s, when he started directing short films in the ’60s. His first professional project was the 1965 TV movie Stadt auf Stelzen, which was followed by additional shorts and TV projects until his breakout in 1981, Das Boot, or The Boat, which told the story of working on a World War II German U-boat.
Das Boot — which earned six Oscar nominations — led Petersen to his first Hollywood release, The NeverEnding Story, which premiered in 1984. That decade, he went on to direct a Das Boot miniseries, plus Enemy Mine.
Petersen produced some of his most famous films in the ’90s, when he directed the Clint Eastwood film In the Line of Fire, a drama about an FBI agent haunted by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He also directed Outbreak, a film about a dangerous virus starring Dustin Hoffman, and Air Force One, Harrison Ford’s box office smash from 1997.
According to Variety, Air Force One was Petersen’s most commercially successful film.
In later years, Petersen directed The Perfect Storm starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, and the Brad Pitt Iliad drama Troy. Petersen’s final two projects are 2006’s Poseidon — which marked his final Hollywood movie — and Vier gegen die Bank, which came 10 years later in 2016.
Petersen is survived by his wife, his son Daniel, and his two grandchildren, per Deadline.
