Wolfgang Petersen best known for directing Das Boot

LOS ANGELES • German film director Wolfgang Petersen, one of a handful of foreign directors to make it big in Hollywood, whose harrowing war film Das Boot (1981) was nominated for six Academy Awards and became one of Germany's top-grossing films, died last Friday in his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 81.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to Ms Michelle Bega, a publicist at the agency Rogers & Cowan PMK.

Petersen was the most commercially successful member of a generation of film-makers active in West Germany from the 1960s to the 1980s, whose leading lights included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog.

But he was equally known in Hollywood.

Over five decades, Petersen toggled between his native Germany and the United States, directing 29 films, many of them box-office hits like 1990s political thrillers In The Line Of Fire (1993), with Clint Eastwood, and Air Force One (1997), with Harrison Ford.

With a knack for genre film-making - action films were another strong suit - he also made forays into fantasy (The NeverEnding Story, 1984), sword-and-sandal epics (Troy, 2004) and science fiction, all while attracting marquee names to star in them, including Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak (1995), Brad Pitt in Troy and George Clooney in The Perfect Storm (2000).

For all his success in Hollywood, however, Petersen will most likely be remembered for Das Boot, a tense drama about sailors on a German U-boat during World War II. In the English-speaking world, that frequently mispronounced title alone ("Boot" is spoken exactly like the English "boat") has attained a kind of pop cultural status, thanks to references on The Simpsons (1989 to present) and other TV shows.

The movie won high praise for its historical accuracy and the claustrophobic effect achieved by cinematographer Jost Vacano, who shot most of the interior scenes with a small hand-held Arriflex camera.

Although the critical response in Germany was divided, with some accusing the film of glorifying war, it encountered a more uniformly positive response abroad. Nowadays, it is considered among the finest anti-war films ever made.

Das Boot (also titled The Boat in English-speaking countries) grossed more than US$80 million worldwide. And although it did not win an Academy Award, its six Oscar nominations - including two for Petersen, for direction and screenplay, and one for Vacano, for cinematography - remain a record for a German film production.

Petersen moved to Los Angeles in 1986, where he would remain for two decades, working with big stars in a string of mainstream successes that included political dramas In The Line Of Fire, about a Secret Service agent's efforts to prevent a presidential assassination, and Air Force One, about the hijacking of the presidential jetliner.

There were also disaster films Outbreak, about a deadly virus, The Perfect Storm, about commercial New England fishermen caught in a terrifying tempest, and Poseidon (2006), a remake of The Poseidon Adventure, a 1972 blockbuster about a capsized luxury liner.

Petersen was married to German actress Ursula Sieg from 1970 to 1978. He later married Ms MariaAntoinette Borgel, whom he had met on the set of Smog (1973), where she worked as a script supervisor. He is survived by his wife as well as a son from his first marriage, Daniel, a film-maker, and two grandchildren.

NYTIMES