Eric Braeden

Braeden was born Hans-Jörg Gudegast on April 3, 1941 in Bredenbek, Germany (near Kiel), a small village in northern Germany where his father was once mayor.

In his autobiography, titled I'll Be Damned, published by HarperCollins in 2017, Braeden said that he was a survivor of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff sinking. The ship was a German transport evacuating civilians, military personnel, and technicians as part of Operation Hannibal, which was sunk on January 30, 1945, by Soviet submarine S-13, in the Baltic Sea. An estimated 9,400 people died. It was the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.Braeden accumulated many TV and film credits during his first two decades in America, and guest-starred in 120 roles. His earliest credits were all under his birth name, Hans Gudegast.

During the 1960s, he appeared in several episodes of TV's longest-running World War II drama (1962–1967) Combat!, always playing a German soldier. In 1965, he appeared in a film called Morituri starring Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, and guest-starred in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as T.H.R.U.S.H. agent Mr. Oakes in "The Discotheque Affair", season two, episode five.

In 1966, he guest-starred as Luftwaffe Major Bentz in episode 28, "Day of Reckoning", of season two of the TV series Twelve O'Clock High (a series which was very loosely based on the classic 1949 war film with the same name) and also appeared in an episode of the 1966 espionage drama series Blue Light. His main character for the next two years was his regular starring role playing German Hauptmann (Captain) Hans Dietrich on the TV series The Rat Patrol (1966–1968),

He starred in the 1969 Western 100 Rifles with Raquel Welch, Burt Reynolds, and Jim Brown (noted for the first big-screen interracial love scene between Welch and Brown), once again playing a villainous German military officer opposite Fernando Lamas. This was his last credit under his birth name.

His starring role in the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), was when he first took the stage name of Eric Braeden. Lew Wasserman of Universal Pictures told him that no one would be allowed to star in an American film if he or she had a German name. After much thought, he took the name Braeden from his hometown of Bredenbek.

His other movie appearances in the 1970s included the role of Dr. Otto Hasslein in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), and that of the arrogant but formidable race-car driver, Bruno von Stickle, in Walt Disney's 1977 Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. Throughout the 1970s, he also guest-starred in a variety of television shows, including The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and also appeared in several episodes of the long-running CBS Western series Gunsmoke.

In addition to many episodic roles, Braeden also appeared as Colonel John Jacob Astor IV in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic. Braeden told Cindy Elavsky that filming the scene in Titanic, in which his character drowned, "was one of the scariest moments in this business for me."