The Self-Made Immigrant Actor

ans Gudegast (a.k.a. Eric Braeden) is a German-born actor whose career has been very different from that of most other German-speaking actors who have made it big in Hollywood. For one thing, although he has appeared in a dozen feature films, including Titanic, Eric Braeden is much better known for his long-time soap opera role as Victor Newman on “The Young and the Restless.” For another, he is the very definition of the self-made man, arriving in the U.S. in 1959 as an unknown 18-year-old with barely $50 to his name.

Eric Braeden is best known for his classic soap opera role
as Victor Newman in “The Young and the Restless.”
PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Not long after his inauspicious arrival in New York harbor, young Hans Jörg Gudegast made his way west, first to Texas for a brief stint as a translator, then on to Montana where he became a ranch hand. Soon, however, he was studying on a university track scholarship in Missoula (he has been a lifelong athlete). But it was an adventure on the Salmon River in Idaho that led Gudegast to Hollywood. He and a college buddy had filmed a documentary of their Salmon River (“of no return”) boat expedition (“The Riverbusters”) and Hans went to L.A. to find a distributor.

Finding Southern California to his liking, Gudegast stayed on there and was soon enrolled as a student at Santa Monica College. Before long, after hearing rumors that there was some demand for German actors, he got an agent and landed his first minor film role in Operation Eichmann (1961, with Werner Klemperer and John Banner).

But almost from the very beginning, most of his acting work was in television. Most fans of the 1960s television series “The Rat Patrol” agree that Gudegast's portrayal of the Nazi Captain Hans Dietrich avoided the stereotypical traits usually associated with such roles. Still using his real name, Hans Gudegast played Dietrich in most episodes of “The Rat Patrol” from 1966 to 1968. He also played Nazis in most of his film and TV work until landing the role of Dr. Charles Forbin in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). His coup of being the first German actor to play an American in a major Hollywood film proved Curt Jurgens wrong. When the two were working together on Broadway in 1965, Jurgens had predicted that Gudegast was doomed to play only Nazis in Hollywood.

But Gudegast had to pay a price for his Colossus role. Universal Pictures insisted that he drop his German name for something more “American.” Hans Gudegast became Eric Braeden, a name that allowed him to retain some of his identity: “Eric was a family name and Braeden is from my village [Bredenbek] in Germany.” But his biggest acting breakthrough—as Eric Braeden—was yet to come.

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