For that country's television, he played the main character of the popular series Das unsichtbare Visier from 1973 to 1979, a spy thriller program designed, in co-operation with the Stasi, as a counterpart to the James Bond films.

These included Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982), Andrzej Wajda's A Love in Germany (1984), Angry Harvest and the Academy Award nominated Hungarian-West German film Colonel Redl (both 1985), the latter about the scandal surrounding Austro-Hungarian Army Colonel Alfred Redl.

Mueller-Stahl played the Soviet general in charge of the occupied United States in the 1987 ABC television miniseries Amerika.

[3] Mueller-Stahl was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the abusive father of pianist David Helfgott in the 1996 film Shine.

In 1999 he played the mastermind of a criminal gang opposite Ray Liotta and Gloria Reuben in Pilgrim, also distributed under the title Inferno.

He had a villainous role in David Cronenberg's crime drama Eastern Promises (2007) and the thriller The International (2009), both of which co-starred British-Australian actress Naomi Watts.