Armin Mueller-Stahl (born 17 December 1930) is a German film actor, painter, writer and musician. Mueller-Stahl was born in Tilsit, East Prussia (now Sovetsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia). His mother, Editta, was from an upper class family and became a university professor at Leipzig, and his father, Alfred Müller, was a bank teller who changed the family's surname to "Mueller-Stahl". His family moved to Berlin while his father fought on the Eastern Front in World War II. Mueller-Stahl was a noted concert violinist while he was a teenager and enrolled in an acting school in East Berlin in 1952. Mueller-Stahl was a successful film and stage actor in East Germany, starring in films such as The Third and Jacob, the Liar. On East-German TV, he played the main character of the popular series Das unsichtbare Visier (see the article in the German Wikipedia) from 1973–1979, a spy thriller program designed, in co-operation with the Stasi, as an East Bloc counterpart to the James Bond franchise. After protesting against Wolf Biermann's denaturalisation in 1976 he was blacklisted by the government and emigrated to West Germany in 1980.