Ulrich Matthes, actor

When Ulrich Matthes acts, he wants to capture the imaginations of audience members and evoke emotions, both positive and negative. He's versatile, although darker, complicated roles suit him more than comedic ones. In 2005 and 2008, the magazine "Theater Heute" named him actor of the year. Ulrich Matthes was born in 1959 in Berlin. His father was a political journalist, his mother a housewife. He and his older brother grew up in a liberal, middle-class family. He played his first television roles when he was just ten. At fourteen, he was working regularly in studios, dubbing film roles into German. He first returned to the screen itself as an adult. He often plays in films that deal with historical subjects. In 2004 he played Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in the Oscar-nominated film "Downfall." That same year he played a victim of the Nazis in Volker Schlöndorff's "The Ninth Day": a Catholic priest interned in Dachau Concentration Camp. He is interested in history and politics privately as well as professionally. He's an enthusiastic newspaper reader and, as a track-and-field fan, is looking forward to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London .