Ulrich Tukur

Tukur spent his youth near Hannover where he finished his final secondary school examinations in 1977. He also earned a high school diploma in Boston, Massachusetts during a student exchange, where he met his first wife, Amber Wood. With her, he has two daughters, Marlene and Lilian. While Tukur and Wood were dating, he finished his time with the army and began to study German, English and history at the University of Tübingen. He worked as a musician for extra money. Someone who saw him asked him if he wanted to be in a play. Soon he became interested in acting and started studying acting at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart in 1980. After finishing his acting studies in 1983, Tukur performed at a theatre in Heidelberg. While he was still a student, he starred in his first movie. In Die Weiße Rose, directed by Michael Verhoeven, he plays the character of Willi Graf.

In 1984 Tukur had his breakthrough at the theatre when famous director Peter Zadek gave him a role at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin in Joshua Sobol's play Ghetto. From 1985 to 1995 he was a staff actor at Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, then managed by Zadek. Here he starred in many plays, such as Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as Marc Anton, Hamlet, and Frank Wedekind's Lulu directed by Zadek. In 1986 he was elected actor of the year by German theater critics. From 1995 to 2003 he was the director of the Hamburger Kammerspiele theatre, sharing that job with Ulrich Waller.

Since 1989, Tukur has been recording and touring as a musician. In 1995, he founded the dance band "Ulrich Tukur & the Rhythmus Boys" together with Kalle Mews (drums), Ulrich Mayer (guitar, vocals), and Günther Märtens (contrabass, guitar, vocals).

Tukur has been married twice. From 1999 until 2019 he and his second wife, the photographer Katharina John, lived in Venice, Italy, on Giudecca . Since 2019 Tukur has been living in Berlin-Schöneberg.

In John Rabe, the Sino-German co-production about the Nanjing massacre, Tukur played the part of John Rabe. In Kommissar Rex he played the psychopath Kurt Hauff, who killed police officer Richard Moser (Tobias Moretti). He also played the title role in the 1999 documentary Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace.