Wolfgang Peterson developed a reputation for big budget blockbusters - including 2004’s Troy
(Picture: Handout)Wolfgang Petersen, the German filmmaker whose World War II submarine epic Das Boot is considered one of the greatest war movies of all time, has died at the age of 81.
Petersen went on to direct Hollywood blockbusters such as In The Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy.
The German director died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles after a battle with pancreatic cancer, said representative Michelle Bega.
Petersen made two features before his 1982 breakthrough, Das Boot which was then the most expensive movie in German film history.
The 149-minute film (the original cut ran 210 minutes) chronicled the intense claustrophobia of life aboard a doomed German U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic, with Jurgen Prochnow as the submarine's commander.
Heralded as an anti-war masterpiece, Das Boot was nominated for six Oscars, including for Petersen's direction and his adaptation of Lothar-Gunther Buchheim's best-selling 1973 novel.
Petersen, born in 1941, recalled as a child running alongside American ships as they threw down food.
Speaking about his time growing up, Petersen told The Los Angeles Times in 2003: "In school they never talked about the time of Hitler - they just blocked it out of their minds and concentrated on rebuilding Germany.
"We kids were looking for more glamorous dreams than rebuilding a destroyed country though, so we were really ready for it when American pop culture came to Germany. We all lived for American movies, and by the time I was 11 I'd decided I wanted to be a filmmaker."
Das Boot launched Petersen as a filmmaker in Hollywood, where he became one of the top makers of cataclysmic action adventures in films spanning war (2004's Troy with Brad Pitt), pandemic (the 1995 ebolavirus-inspired Outbreak) and other ocean-set disasters (2000's The Perfect Storm and 2006's Poseidon, a remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," about the capsizing of an ocean liner).
But Petersen's next foray in moviemaking after Das Boot was child fantasy with the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story.
Arguably Petersen's finest Hollywood film came almost a decade later in 1993's In the Line of Fire, starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent protecting the president of the United States from John Malkovich's assassin. In it, Petersen marshalled his substantial skill in building suspense for a more open-air but just as taut thriller that careened across rooftops and past Washington D.C. monuments.
Petersen was first married to German actress Ursula Sieg. When they divorced in 1978, he married Maria-Antoinette Borgel, a German script supervisor and assistant director. He's survived by Borgel, son Daniel Petersen and two grandchildren.
