Ulrich Tukur shines particularly brightly in the twilight. His best parts are apparently innocent yet dangerous figures, inscrutable protagonists. Then suddenly he breaks out of that role, alters his expression just a little and the candid boyish face that looked staid to ordinary, becomes diabolic, evil. But usually he lets the figures preserve a modicum of mystery and contradiction, a hint of the human, even in the worst of his characters. He enjoys these best. After all, as he puts it, the contradictions are more interesting. Yet in conversation the actor seems so friendly, so forthcoming, and usually also relaxed. He likes wearing a bright striped shirt under his suit and sporting an ironic expression around the corners of his mouth, and – more than just on the side – he plays cheerful dance music with his band Die Rhythmus Boys. Of course these are not mutually exclusive activities. Perhaps it is even a precondition for being able to convincingly portray those obnoxious figures. And anyway, Ulrich Tukur believes that “acting is confidence trickery, but without hurting anyone”.
In his case, however, acting is one thing above all: ability. Tukur, born in 1957, was excellent as the unscrupulous Stasi lieutenant-colonel Anton Grubitz in the dramatic Oscar winning film The Life of Others. In The White Ribbon, which was also nominated for an Oscar, he played the apparently patronizing but authoritarian squire. And he lent his face to John Rabe, a member of the National Socialist party, who saved the lives of 250,000 people in China in 1937/38. Three international successes. Yet apparently the drama school in Stuttgart did not recognize his talent in the early 1980s. The methods used there for appropriating a role were of no use to Tukur: “They always said to me: be porous. What was that supposed to mean?” Nevertheless, he passed the stage acting examination, but then learned how to act in films, and above all in the theatre – often in painful conflict with the provocative theatre god Peter Zadek. In 1984 the director cast the young actor as SS Officer Kittel in Joshua Sobol’s play Ghetto at the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin. The critics lauded Tukur as a new discovery in German theatre. Prize after prize followed, and role after role, almost without interruption, to this very day. Tukur’s brilliance is particularly evident in historical figures. “There are people like Ulrich Tukur who in the most charming way are not part of their time.” This quotation from a review has a prominent place on Tukur’s website. He obviously likes it. The past, or what Tukur likes to call the “vertical”, has interested him since, as a boy, he climbed over the ancient remains of the Roman Limes and later did a few terms of history at college. The period between the end of the First World War and 1933 appealed to him in particular, the “celebration of life shortly before doom”. In his first volume of stories Die Seerose im Speisesaal he describes acting as a “journey to the lives of people who have passed away”. And Tukur, the inscrutable actor, is a surprisingly expert narrator. As demonstrated by his excursions into the anecdotal in almost every interview, he really likes a good story, beginning with that of his name, which is a corruption of the French “tout cour”; he is actually called Scheurlen, an unpronounceable Swabian name. Yet the aim of his narrative is not some disdainful punch line. In Tukur’s stories reality takes on a glow, is stylized to the point of becoming tenderly romantic. It is just as well a publisher persuaded the busy man to try writing.
Tukur seems indefatigable: in 2011 he received a Golden Camera as best actor for playing the unusual investigator Murot in Tatort, the TV crime series. It was a role he helped to develop, giving it depth and thereby raising the crime story to the status of an intimate play. He recently shot a second episode near Frankfurt. Tukur’s latest feature film Within the Whirlwind, a European-directed Gulag drama in which he plays the main protagonist alongside English actress Emily Watson, has just been released. Currently he is working with director Helmut Dietl in a TV grotesque in Berlin, but in between times he is also to be found in a studio with his Rhythmus Boys. And he has just published a second book, of poetry this time. There is a restlessness about all this. Yet Tukur also has his places of refuge, his resting places: Venice, where he has lived for a decade with his wife, the photographer Katharina John, and an isolated village in the Apennines, where he owns “a heap of stones in untouched nature”.
More than once, Tukur’s multi-talent provided the impetus for his career. This was already the case under Zadek. He was the first person Tukur played his accordion for. And he got the role beside George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris because of his unusual demo tape: Tukur presented one casting text by singing it as a tango, and read another to his dog, who listened with interest. According to Hollywood, Tukur got the role because he had such a gifted dog. A nice story. At least once, however, living in parallel art worlds actually cost him a piece of success: he auditioned with Quentin Tarantino for the role of SS henchman Landa in Inglourious Basterds, which received many awards. The role would have been just right for Tukur: a charismatic bastard. But at the time of shooting, Tukur had a tour with the Rhythmus Boys. So Tarantino gave the role to Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for it. But that is one more good story for Tukur.////
