Eric Braeden (born Hans-Jörg Gudegast; April 3rd, 1941) is a German-born film and television actor, known for his roles as Victor Newman on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless, as Hans Dietrich in the 1960s TV series The Rat Patrol, Dr. Charles Forbin in Colossus: The Forbin Project, as Dr. Otto Hasslein in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and as John Jacob Astor IV in the 1997 film Titanic. He won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1998 for Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the role of Victor Newman.
Trivia[]
- In his autobiography, titled I'll Be Damned, published by Harper Collins in 2017, Braeden stated that he was a survivor of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff sinking. The ship was a German transport evacuating civilians, military personnel, and technicians as part of Operation Hannibal, which was sunk on January 30th, 1945, by Soviet submarine S-13, in the Baltic Sea. An estimated 9,600+ people died. It was the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.