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Jörg Gudzuhn was born on 23 March 1945 in Seilershof, Brandenburg. After the family moved to the eastern part of Berlin, he attended primary school and then a grammar school in Berlin-Reinickendorf. Since the school was located in West Berlin, he could not continue to attend it after the construction of the Berlin Wall. As a result, Gudzuhn dropped out of high school without graduating. He first worked in a factory in Berlin-Lichtenberg, then completed an apprenticeship as a house and wall painter until 1966. In addition to his training, he completed school and started acting in an amateur theatre group. From 1966 to 1970 Gudzuhn studied at the State Acting School 'Ernst Busch' in Berlin.
After graduation he was a member of the ensemble of the Volksbühne in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today: Chemnitz; 1970-1974) and at the Hans-Otto-Theater in Potsdam (1974-1976). During this time Gudzuhn also made his debut on the big screen: under the direction of Rainer Simon, he had a small role as the hangman in the DEFA production "Till Eulenspiegel" (GDR 1975). In the following years, he appeared in a number of DEFA TV productions, among them the mini-series "Marx und Engels - Stationen ihres Lebens" (GDR 1978-1980), Gudzuhn's mainly continued working as a stage actor though. In 1976 he went to the Maxim-Gorki-Theater in Berlin, whose ensemble he was a member of until 1987. His great successes there include McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and Vershinin in Chekhov's "Three Sisters".
In 1982, Rainer Simon cast him in a leading role in the feature film "Das Luftschiff" as an obsessive inventor who wants to construct flying machines but fails due to political circumstances, among other things. After this highly acclaimed role Gudzuhn regularly appeared in cinema and television productions. His performance in the complex love and relationship story "Eine sonderbare Liebe" ("A Strange Love", 1984, directed by Lothar Warnecke) earned him the Critics' Prize of the Association of Film and Television Professionals.
Together with director Bernhard Wicki he shot the humanistic drama "Die Grünstein-Variante" (1985, FRG/GDR), about three prisoners during war, who connect through playing chess. Lighter fare was the comedy "Fahrschule" ("Driving School", GDR 1986), about a dyed-in-the-wool pedestrian who surprisingly comes into possession of two cars. For this role Gudzuhn won the leading actor award at the 5th national feature film festival of the GDR in Karl-Marx-Stadt as well as the acting award at the Eberswalde Film Festival. He received much critical praise - even beyond the borders of the GDR - for his portrayal of the mentally torn artist Hans Fallada in Roland Gräf's biopic "Fallada - Letztes Kapitel" ("Fallada – The Last Chapter", GDR 1988). For his portrayal of Fallada, he was awarded the Silver Hugo for Best Actor at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1989.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the GDR, Gudzuhn could continue his career without interruption. Under the direction of Heiner Carow, he played a GDR village mayor in the German-German love and social drama "Verfehlung" ("The Mistake", 1992), who, out of disdained love, has a cleaning woman (Angelica Domröse) spied on and humiliated because she fell in love with a worker from the West (Gottfried John). "Verfehlung" was praised by critics not only as an equally realistic and ruthless settling of accounts with the SED regime, but also for the sensitive acting.
After that Jörg Gudzuhn was seen almost exclusively in TV productions. In 1992/93 he played an eccentric city cowboy in six episodes of the series "Liebling - Kreuzberg"; Roland Suso Richter cast him in the crime drama "Das Phantom - Die Jagd nach Dagobert" (1994, TV) in a leading role as a commissioner. For the role reversal comedy "Viel Spaß mit meiner Frau" (1996) he won a Grimme Prize together with director Peter Welz and co-star Jörg Schüttauf. From 1998 to 2007, Gudzuhn starred in the crime series "Der letzte Zeuge" alongside Ulrich Mühe and Gesine Cukrowski as a grumpy commissioner; he was nominated for Best Actor in this role at the German Television Awards 2000. He also had an important role as bodyguard in the TV film "Im Schatten der Macht" ("In the Shadow of Power", 2003), about the political overthrow of Willy Brandt. Gudzuhn's only big screen role remained a boarding school maths teacher in Hans Christian Schmid's coming-of-age film "Crazy" (2000).
Despite his screen work, Jörg Gudzuhn has always been very active as a stage actor, too. Since 1987 he has been a member of the ensemble of the Deutsches Theater Berlin, where he played, among others, Mackie Messer in "The Threepenny Opera" (1994/95), Oedipus in "King Oedipus" (1996/97) and Sultan Saladin in Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" (2002). An outstanding success was his solo performance with "Leben bis Männer oder: Der Fußballtrainer" by Thomas Brussig: Between 2001 and 2010, he appeared on stage around 100 times in the role of a bossy ex-GDR football coach. At the same time, Gudzuhn also appeared in numerous other plays. In 2009, for example, he played in Arthur Schnitzler's "Der einsame Weg", in a production by Christian Petzold, in which he played Professor Wegrat alongside Nina Hoss.
Among his important TV appearances are the improvised comedy "Altersglühen - Speed Dating für Senioren" (2014) and as court president in the award-winning social drama "Das Ende der Geduld" (2014).
From 2012 to 2017 he appeared in the crime series "Alles Klara" in the leading role of a forensic doctor. Dominik Graf cast him in a smaller role in his character study "Hanne" (2018), about a woman (Iris Berben) who learns that she may have leukemia. Gudzuhn played a recurring role in the popular "Krüger" TV game series: In "Krüger aus Almanya" (2015), "Krügers Odyssey" (2017), "Kiss the Hand, Krüger" (2018) and "Kryger bleibt Krüger" (2020) he was Paul Krüger's close buddy Ecki. For his leading role in the family comedy "Familie Lotzmann auf den Barrikaden" he won his second Grimme Prize in 2019 together with Gisela Schneeberger, Axel Ranisch (director) and Sönke Andresen (book).
Gudzuhn played Merlin in the semi-opera „King Arthur“ at the Berlin State Opera at the end of 2019.
Jörg Gudzuhn lives in Berlin.