Singer overcame shyness to become a star ‘Das Boot’ was ‘big turning point’
MARGARET Urlich was a multiawardwinning musician in New Zealand and Australia.
She began her career as a colead vocalist with the New Zealand newwave band Peking Man, whose 1985 song Room
That Echoes climbed to No 1 in the NZ charts.
She then joined allfemale group When the Cat’s Away in 1986, which won best group at the New Zealand Music Awards and had another No 1 hit with a rendition of Blue Mink’s Melting Pot in 1988, before launching her solo career.
Last year, she was inducted into the New Zealand Music
Hall of Fame.
Tributes have been pouring in for beloved Kiwi musician who died on Monday aged 57 after battling cancer for two and ahalf years.
She died at her home in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands, surrounded by her family.
While the seriousness of her illness was known to her peers and industry colleagues, details of her health were kept private at the request of her family.
‘‘Margaret is a muchloved multi awardwinning member of the Australian and New Zealand music industry who captured hearts around the world as a gifted singer/songwriter with a unique voice and sense of style,’’ their statement read.
As a solo artist, she was responsible for hits such as Escaping and Boy in the Moon in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A cousin of fellow Kiwi musician Peter Urlich,
Margaret Urlich was one of the most successful transtasman musicians ever, selling more than 400,000 albums during her career.
She found fame in Australia for singing The Horses with
Daryl Braithwaite.
She did not appear in the music video for The Horses and model Gillian Bailey lipsynched her backing vocals instead, with Urlich later saying she regretted not taking part.
‘‘I was nicknamed Gilli Vanilli for a while,’’ she told News Corp in 2016.
‘‘I was recording an album in London when they did the video. I could have come back to do the video but I was doing my own thing by that stage. A lot of people know it’s my singing, but they don’t put two and two together that it’s not me in the video.
‘‘In retrospect it was probably a little bit silly because the song was so huge. But at the time I was young and a bit stupid, I did what I thought was right. But it was absolutely no disrespect to Daryl.’’
The Horses took four months to reach No 1 in Australia in 1991, and eventually spent 12 weeks in the Top 10.
It has since become a cult classic in Australia and regularly features on TV shows and adverts.
She won an Australian ARIA music award in 1991 for best breakthrough artist after becoming the first female solo artist to top the New Zealand charts.
Her song Escaping was a No 1 in New Zealand and her first two albums, Safety in Numbers and Chameleon Dreams, made the top five in Australia.
Ulrich went on to release two more albums, The Deepest Blue (1995) and Second Nature (1999).
She also released a live album in 1994 and was part of the New Zealand cast of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1993.
Peter Urlich said she was ‘‘the most beautiful woman, on the inside and out’’.
‘‘Everyone always presumed she was my sister. ‘How’s your sis doing in Oz?’ they’d ask. In the end, I just gave in,’’ he recalled, adding that she had inherited her passion for music from her father.
‘‘She sang so effortlessly and with such soul and sass, she had her own sound. I was stunned when I first saw
Peking Man because as a girl she was very shy. She developed a level of sophistication that marked her out.
‘‘Marg was super stylish and she oozed confidence but underneath, she was a female who had to overcome her shyness to try to make it in a tough, maledominated industry. But she was ambitious and determined. And she did it! When you look at her body of work from Room That Echoes to Escaping to Boy in the Moon, she absolutely had it all. I was a total fan and I’m very proud of her.’’ —
WOLFGANG Petersen, the German director whose films include Das Boot, Air Force One and The Perfect Storm, was as highly regarded in his adopted California as in his home country, having worked with stars such as Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Harrison Ford, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Rene Russo and Glenn Close over the course of his decadeslong career.
He died on August 12, aged 81, of pancreatic cancer.
Shortly before his 80th birthday last year, Petersen told DPA he wanted to ‘‘sail over this round anniversary quite casually’’, joking that he was ignoring retirement and would probably be working at the age of 100 if he could.
He said he was not the type to live in the past: ‘‘For me, the view is forward. I rarely look at films I’ve made. But Das Boot was clearly the big turning point in my life and in my career.’’
The cinematic epic about the crew of a German submarine during World War 2 was nominated for six Oscars and paved Petersen’s way to Hollywood.
Petersen, then in his early 40s, was nominated for directing and adapted screenplay, plus cinematography, editing, sound and sound editing. In the end,
Gandhi, directed by Britain’s Richard Attenborough, was the big Oscar winner. Das Boot came away emptyhanded, but it was the starting signal for a major Hollywood career.
Petersen settled in Los Angeles with his wife Maria in 1987.
Petersen landed another boxoffice hit with the fantasy tale
The Neverending Story, followed by the science fiction film Enemy Mine.
The political thriller In the Line Of Fire with Clint
Eastwood as a Secret Service agent was a big box office hit in 1993. The hits then came in rapid succession over the next decade: Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman, Air Force One with Harrison Ford, The Perfect Storm with George Clooney,
Troy with Brad Pitt.
It wasn’t until 2006’s
Poseidon, about an ocean disaster to befall a luxury cruise ship, that his success story cooled. The thriller, which cost around
$US160 million to make, flopped worldwide.
Wolfgang Petersen was born in Emden, Germany on March 14, 1941, and grew up in Hamburg. Later, he honed his craft at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin.
In 1971, he had immediate success with his work on the popular German crime series
Tatort. Petersen then became known as a taboo breaker with the 1977 feature film Die Konsequenz, which deals with homosexual love.
In 2021, in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, Petersen planned a directorial project in Germany — a love story about a KGB agent and a young East German woman, based on a true incident shortly before the Berlin Wall was built. The project never came to pass. — Barbara Munker, DPA