Wolfgang Petersen - The Professional

If he'd only made Das Boot, a place in the movie pantheon would still be his. But there was so much more to the German who became the ideal studio director.

“Das Boot bloke dies” - this was the gist of many a Wolfgang Petersen obituary. It’s understandable. Whether in its theatrical cut or the unexpurgated, multi-part TV version, the adventures of German submarine U-96 and its battered Kapitänleutnant, played by Jurgen Prochnow, is a from-the-Axis-side Second World War story to rival Sam Peckinpah’s Cross Of Iron.

Wolfgang Petersen, however, had a life before Das Boot (The Boat). And he had quite a remarkable one afterwards, too.

Born near Hanover in 1941, Petersen studied in Hamburg, leaving full-time education with a strong desire to make a living from drama. Besides mounting productions at the Ernst Deutch Theatre, he took film and TV courses at the Berlin Film and Television Academy. From here, it wasn’t long before he was directing his first television programmes, a process that would introduce him to the man who’d become his actor of choice, the aforementioned Mr Prochnow.

Petersen directed the feature-length I Will Kill You Wolf in 1971, but his first picture proper is widely considered to be 1974’s One Or The Other. A German-language blackmail thriller starring Prochnow and and Carry On Behind's very own Elke Sommer, it wasn't quite the springboard Petersen hoped. Indeed, three years would pass before he was again hired by a film studio, this time to make The Consequence, a controversial picture about the son of a prison guard (played by Ernst Hannawald) who falls in love with an inmate (Prochnow again).

Though it’s now considered something of a landmark movie, The Consequence‘s subject matter put off studio chains and TV channels alike. One could also imagine that a film about the Second World War mightn’t go down a storm with local audiences and distributors. But four years later, when Das Boot was launched, Petersen was quickly whisked from cinema’s no man’s land to the red carpet.