Michael Max Degen was born January 31, 1932, in Chemnitz. He attended the Jewish school in Berlin.

During the Nazi regime, his Jewish family was in severe danger of being deported to one of the concentration and extermination camps. Michael Degen managed to survive the time of war and persecution together with his mother. While his father was murdered in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, they were hidden by friends in Berlin. Decades later, Degen published his much-noticed autobiography "Nicht alle waren Mörder. Eine Kindheit in Berlin" (1999), in which he described his experiences from that time.

After having made his stage debut in 1946, he studied acting at the drama school of the German Theater in East Berlin. Following a two-year stay in Israel, Degen returned to the Berliner Ensemble. During the next years, he had engagements at several German-speaking stages, including theaters in Cologne, Vienna, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Mannheim, and West Berlin. In the late 1960s, Degen made his debut as a director. Throughout his later career, he always returned to the theater both as an actor and a director.

During the 1970s, Michael Degen increased his work for the big screen. Aside from Roland Klick's city thriller "Supermarkt", he also starred in "Al di là del bene e del male" ("Beyond Good and Evil"), directed by Liliana Cavani. In 1978, he could be seen in Franz Peter Wirth's TV mini-series "Die Buddenbrooks", and in 1982, Degen took on a role in Egon Monk's TV movie "Die Geschwister Oppermann". In 1985, he played one of the leading roles in "Die Kolonie", a movie depicting the despotic circumstances in the German "Colonia Dignidad" commune in Chile.

In the 1980s, Degen became one of the most distinguished German television actors. He worked with directors such as Peter Beauvais and Dieter Wedel, and caused a stir with his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Michael Kehlmann's TV movie "Geheime Reichssache" (1987). Furthermore, he achieved great popularity with his role in the successful TV series "Diese Drombuschs".

Despite being a very busy stage and television actor, Degen still found time to star in big screen movies, including the European co-production "Dr. M" (directed by Claude Chabrol), and Romuald Karmakar's movies "Das Frankfurter Kreuz" and "Manila".

Furthermore, he played the leading roles in both Joseph Vilsmaier's "Leo und Claire" and the Holocaust drama "Babi Yar", which was produced by Artur Brauner. In 2002, Michael Degen published the novel "Blondi", in which he describes the atrocities during the Nazi era from the perspective of Hitler's German Sheperd dog.

As an actor, he appeared again in the following years, primarily in numerous television productions, where he frequently embodied father figures of the most varied character. Noteworthy roles include the loving father of Alexandra Maria Lara's main character in the three-part historical family saga "Der Wunschbaum" (2004), a status-conscious family head in the two-part "Die Sturmflut" (2006) and an authoritarian patriarch in the "Tatort" episode "Satisfaktion" (2007). Degen was the father of the title character (Veronica Ferres) in "Die Patin - Kein Weg zurück" (2008) and played a mysterious Holocaust survivor living in Israel in the acclaimed crime drama "Die Seele eines Mörders" (2009).  

It wasn't until 2012 that Degen was seen again in a feature film, as a company director in Ralf Huettner's culture-clash comedy "Ausgerechnet Sibirien" ("Lost in Sibiria") starring Joachim Król. The following year, he portrayed the German-Israeli Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld in Margarethe von Trotta's "Hannah Arendt" (2013).   

After that, his screen appearances became rarer. He took on sporadic guest roles in series and played a leading role in the feature film "Das letzte Mahl" ("The Last Supper", 2018), about the conflict-ridden gathering of a Jewish family on the day Adolf Hitler came to power in March 1933.   

At the end of 2019, the series "Donna Leon" ended, in which Degen had played the superior of the commissioner Brunetti for almost 20 years.

Shortly after his 90th birthday, Michael Degen passed away April 9, 2022 in Hamburg.