Ernst Jacobi began his acting career on stage, including at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Later he can also be seen and heard in film and television. For decades he made a name for himself as a man for difficult figures. The native of Berlin has now died at the age of 88.
He was known for difficult character roles, mainly on television and in the theatre. Now the actor Ernst Jacobi is dead. He died at the age of 88, according to his management. He fell asleep peacefully. Jacobi, who was born in Berlin and lived in Munich, played, among other things, the role of Gauleiter Löbsack in Volker Schlöndorff’s Grass adaptation “The Tin Drum”. He was also the narrator in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
You never saw him in funny roles. “Yes, I’m just found difficult,” he said in an interview with BR-alpha around 2008. He doesn’t think he’s complicated at all. In the interview, he explained that he kept playing the difficult characters: “Either people had a very good eye and thought that I should actually be able to do it, that I could do it, but I know how they saw it not. Or it was just an experiment that they said: ‘Well, let’s try that now.’ And then it went well and suddenly you had a specialist for such roles (…).”
Jacobi began his career in theater in the 1950s. After graduating from high school, he completed his acting training in Berlin, and later also took classes in Paris. From Berlin he was drawn to the big houses, including the Burgtheater in Vienna and the Schauspielhaus in Zurich.
In the 2003 film “Sams in Danger” he played the school director Herr Waatermann alongside Ulrich Noethen and Christine Ursprechen. He was also seen on television for decades: he embodied well over 200 TV roles. A few years ago he appeared in smaller roles, for example in “Rote Rosen”. He played one of his last roles in 2017 in “Polizeiruf 110”, since then, according to his management, he has lived in seclusion.
Jacobi also worked a lot with his voice behind the camera. He recorded audio books and set films to music. He could be heard as the German voice of the crazy inventor Doc Brown in “Back to the Future”. German-speaking voices also had to be found for the cartoon “Peter Pan” from 1953. “At the age of only 20, I took on the leading role of the boy who never wanted to grow up,” said Jacobi in an interview for the “The Sound of Disney” 2020 exhibition in Frankfurt am Main. He had seen the film again after almost 70 years.
What was it like seeing the film again after such a long time? “I was totally surprised,” he said at the time, sitting in an armchair. Of course he had forgotten a lot, which then came back. He thought the film was wonderful. “And I didn’t even know that I (…) had so much strength and desire and confidence at the time,” he said. “I remember that harder.”
His presence, which surprised Jacobi himself, brought him awards and a lot of praise. The “FAZ” once wrote in the 1990s that you could watch Jacobi assembling figures: “strict and factual”. But you can always see how he tries to get these figures to take off: as if they were destined for something higher. “A lot of things seem more important to him than they are. Other actors strive for profundity. Ernst Jacobi strives for high meaning.”
