Director Percy Adlon has died at the age of 88

MHe achieved great fame in the 1980s with the famous film “Out of Rosenheim”: Munich-born director Percy Adlon has died at the age of 88. As the family confirmed to the German News Agency on Monday, Adlon died peacefully last Sunday surrounded by his family in Los Angeles, California.

Marianne Sagebrecht in the California desert

Adlon made cinema history nearly 40 years ago with the bizarre comedy Out of Rosenheim (1987). In the film, a buxom Marianne Sagebrecht in a traditional hat drags a suitcase across the American desert in a California town and meets a young black hotelier—the beginning of a poignant female friendship. The film, titled “Baghdad Café,” achieved international success and won awards.

Two years earlier, Adlon had directed “Sugar Baby” with the leading actress, whom he once described as “an Alpine version of Marlene Dietrich.” In it, Sägebrecht played a lonely funeral home employee who falls in love with the voice of a subway driver.

Shortly after his success with Out of Rosenheim, Adlon took the film's title seriously and moved away from Upper Bavaria. At the end of the eighties, he moved to Los Angeles. “I came here and stayed, like Yasmine from the Bagdad Café,” he once wrote.