Armin Mueller-Stahl

A world-famous star and exceptional artist

His many talents are legend. On the eve of his 80th birthday on 17 December 2010, the accomplished concert violinist and star of stage and screen will look back on a dazzling career. A much-loved stage actor in the German Democratic Republic and a famous film star in West Germany, he ventured to Hollywood at the grand old age of sixty. With numerous awards and an Oscar nomination, his name is synonymous with entertaining and intelligent films. More recently, he has also found success as a painter. Volker Skierka gives us a comprehensive and in-depth portrait of his long-standing friend Armin Mueller-Stahl, showing the various facets of this exceptional star and delivering some surprising insights.


Volker Skierka, born in 1952, worked for Reuters among others, before becoming the Berlin correspondent for Süddeutsche Zeitung. From 1986 to 1989, he was head of SZ’s Hamburg office, then the correspondent for Latin America and the Caribbean until 1992; after that, he was editor-in-chief of Merian in Hamburg until 1997. Since then, he has worked as a freelance writer, journalist, presenter and lecturer.

“Being close to someone makes writing his or her biography easy on the one hand, but on the other it complicates the issue. So I have attempted to compose a journalistically sound portrait based on the many conversations we had, very much informed by Mueller-Stahl’s own words and thoughts.”
VOLKER SKIERKA