Jürgen Prochnow makes command look like a demanding job, and his restrained captain in Das Boot remains our reason to seek him out. Hollywood’s repeated casting of him as officers and villains has often asked less.
Fi1m perspective
In Das Boot (1981), Jürgen Prochnow makes a captain’s concentration worth watching. The crew need him to know what to do, although he cannot make their submarine any less vulnerable. We were frightened because his watchfulness made us feel how much the crew depended on him. Wolfgang Petersen gets the important thing right here: the man in command needs to keep thinking, and the actor lets us see the effort.
His restraint keeps the fear personal when the action might otherwise become a succession of shouted orders. It also covers some thin writing around him. Several of the crew remain easier to identify by their duties than by their personalities, and no amount of conviction from Prochnow can put that right. We believe in the men as a working group, but the captain is the one whose burden we understand most clearly.
His early German work favoured taciturn loners and men with firm convictions, before Das Boot brought international recognition. Hollywood supporting parts followed from the mid-1980s, with Duke Leto Atreides in Dune (1984) among the early roles. The subsequent run of officers and villains suggests how readily casting can mistake convincing authority for everything an actor has to offer. The typecasting in Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Judge Dredd (1995) narrowed what those parts asked of him.
In Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient (1996), Prochnow takes the supporting role of Major Muller. We recommend that moving, sometimes slow wartime romance chiefly for Kristin Scott Thomas’s urgency, rather than for what it tells us about him. Petersen cast him again in Air Force One (1997), as General Ivan Radek, another military figure in a career already well supplied with them. The uniform is no guarantee that a film will use him well. Start with Das Boot, where he has men to look after and something more demanding to do than appear formidable.
Biography
Jürgen Prochnow is a German actor. Born in Berlin on 10 June 1941, he grew up in Düsseldorf and trained at the Folkwang School in Essen.
He first gained international recognition for his portrayal of the U-boat commander "Der Alte" in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (1981). Other notable roles include Duke Leto Atreides in Dune (1984), Maxwell Dent in Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Judge Griffin in Judge Dredd (1995), Major Muller in The English Patient (1996), General Ivan Radek in Air Force One (1997), and André Vernet in The Da Vinci Code (2006).
Prochnow is a recipient of the Goldene Kamera, Bavarian Film Award and Bambi Award.
