Ernst Jacobi is dead. Born Ernst Gerhard Ludwig Jacobi-Scherbening on July 11, 1933 in Berlin, the actor had a difficult childhood: his parents divorced shortly after his birth, and Jacobi grew up with his mother and a stepsister .

In 1939 his mother, who worked in the Reich Air Ministry, was transferred to Norway. The boy was given to his father's sister in a Protestant parish household and experienced a rigid upbringing there.

In 1951, at the age of 17, Jacobi passed his Abitur and originally wanted to study horticulture.

Two years earlier he had taken part in the children's choir of the RIAS Berlin and received his first role there in 1948.

From 1951 to 1953 he completed acting training at the Max Reinhardt School in Berlin.

In the mid-1960s he also took lessons on Jacques Lecoq's “Stage d'été sur le mîme” in Paris, after having been lastingly impressed by the pantomime Marcel Marceau as “Bip” in 1951.

Jacobi received his first contract in 1951 at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin under Rudolf Nolte.

Until 1969 he was engaged at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, at the Tribüne and at the Schiller Theater in Berlin, at the municipal theaters in Frankfurt am Main, the theaters of the city of Cologne, at the Hamburg Theater im Zimmer and in Schleswig at the Nordmark Theater there.

During these years he worked with directors such as Karl Heinz Stroux and Erwin Piscator.

In 1969 he was engaged at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, followed by contracts with the Munich Kammerspiele, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Renaissance Theater Berlin and various touring stages.

Jacobi stayed at the Burgtheater, where he met Peter Palitzsch, for ten years, from 1977 to 1987, after which he was under contract for five years at the Zurich Schauspielhaus.

Cultivated floating

As early as 1951, Jacobi had taken part in the first test programs on television, to which he has remained loyal ever since.

By the late 1990s, he had played well over two hundred television roles.

In addition, he became a sought-after radio play speaker and successful radio play author.

He used his art of speaking in the dubbing of over forty films, including German versions of Walt Disney productions.

His performance as the title hero in the television film "The Life of the Schizophrenic Poet Alexander March", based on Heinar Kipphardt's play, has won several awards.

The "groomed hovering over the snake pits of a world that has gone mad, which he looks down on politely and cynically" he also succeeded as "lunatic" in the German-language premiere of Stoppard's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favor" in Vienna in 1981, she praised Frankfurter Allgemeine.

At the same time, it recalled his brilliant performances as “the dry, impersonal Franz Moor”, as Andri in Max Frisch’s “Andorra” or, in 1984, as the ideologue Kruk in Sobol’s “Ghetto”, directed by Peter Zadek.

retreat

Again living up to his reputation for always playing difficult or broken characters, Jacobi took on a role in the problematic incest drama Roula in 1996.

Here he played the father of the title character, who abused the now-adult woman as a child.

Outstanding films with Jacobi since the late 1990s include the theatrical production Hamsun (1996), in which he played Adolf Hitler, roles in series such as Lawyer Abel – The Dirty Dozen, and in 2002 the film Im Chaos der Feelings “.

From the few roles in the following years, the television film “Am Abend aller Tage” (2017), directed by Dominik Graf and inspired by the Cornelius Gurlitt case, stands out.

In it, a young art connoisseur hired by a group of elderly businessmen goes in search of a lost Expressionist painting.

Jacobi played the reclusive collector who owns the painting.

In the episode "Nachtdienst" of the crime series "Polizeiruf 110" (with Matthias Brandt as Inspector van Meuffels), Jacobi acted as one of the senior citizens in the old people's home, who ended up shooting all of his roommates who were suffering from a lack of care in order to draw attention to the conditions in point out to the understaffed nursing home.

After filming, Ernst Jacobi lived a secluded life in Munich.

He fell asleep peacefully at the age of 88, his management in Munich said on Thursday.