Biography
Josef Sommer is a German-American actor known for supporting roles in film and television. Born Maximilian Josef Sommer on 26 June 1934 in Greifswald, Germany, he was raised in North Carolina and studied theatre at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
He began his professional career on stage, making his Broadway debut in 1970 in Othello and later receiving a Drama Desk Award nomination for his performance in Hamlet (1991). Sommer made his film debut in Dirty Harry (1971) and appeared in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Silkwood (1983) and Witness (1985), in which he played Chief Paul Schaeffer.
Other notable film roles include the narrator in Sophie's Choice (1982), Senator Jessup in The Sum of All Fears (2002) and the President in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006). He has also portrayed historical figures such as Gerald Ford and Franklin D. Roosevelt in television films.
