Michael Verhoeven married Austrian actress Senta Berger in 1966 and stayed with her until his death in 2024 – in what is considered one of the longest-running scandal-free marriages in show business.

He obtained his doctorate in 1969 with a thesis on psychiatric masking of brain tumors with special consideration of misleading findings and worked as a doctor for several years – including in the USA, where he had followed his wife Senta Berger, who was acting in Hollywood films in the 1960s alongside stars such as Charlton Heston, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Richard Widmark, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Yul Brynner.

Back in Munich in 1965, he founded Sentana Filmproduktion together with his wife and began directing films – starting with The Dance of Death based on August Strindberg's play of the same name.

[4] He followed up with two frolicky '60s lifestyle comedies Up the Establishment with Mario Adorf and Gila von Weiterhausen in the leading roles (1968),[5] and Student of the Bedroom (1969), both produced by Rob Houwer.

For decades, Verhoeven also ran movie theaters in Berlin: the Toni at Antonplatz and the Olympia Filmtheater in Prenzlauer Berg until he sold the properties in the late 2010s.

In 2000, Verhoeven wrote and directed the controversial television film Enthüllung einer Ehe (Uncover of a Marriage), which deals with the then still-taboo subject of transgender identity, for which he won the Robert Geisendörfer Preis, as well as two FIPA Awards at the International Festival of Audiovisual Programmes[12] in Biarritz.

In 2005, Verhoeven received the Marion Samuel Prize, which honors particularly effective ways of combating the forgetting, suppression, and relativization of the crimes committed by Germans during the Nazi era.

[13] In 2000, Verhoeven made his first documentary: Der Fall Liebl – Ein Bayer in Togo, about a late repatriate who was unfamiliar with German bureaucracy and was threatened with deportation.

In his 2008 documentary Human Failure (Menschliches Versagen), Verhoeven dealt with the question of the extent to which the German civil population profited from the confiscation of Jewish assets during the Nazi era.

[14] In his 2011 documentary The Second Execution of Romell Broom (Die zweite Hinrichtung – Amerika und die Todesstrafe), made in collaboration with Bayerischer Rundfunk, Verhoeven took on the subject of capital punishment, following the death sentence for Romell Broom, found guilty for rape and murder, and his execution on 15 September 2009 in Lucasville, Ohio, which failed 18 times and was finally aborted.

His last directorial and screenwriting work, Let's go!, was adapted in 2014 from the autobiographical novel Von Zuhause wird nichts erzählt by Laura Waco about her Jewish family in postwar Munich.