Annette Frier celebrates her 50th birthday
This actress cannot be pigeonholed
Annette Frier was born on January 22, 1974 in Cologne. After graduating from high school, she studied classical acting for three years at the “Keller Drama School” and can now look back on a wide range of decades-long work for TV and cinema productions.
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Actress Annette Frier turns 50. The former joke of the private TV channels has developed into a true jack-of-all-trades.
“Shit, how do I get this sorted?”
“There’s almost always the wrong job title under your own name. And you think: Shit, how can I get this sorted? Because that of course creates false expectations among people,” she said years ago. She did a lot to “settle” this and worked on many projects beyond comedies and comedy shows: in 2017, for example, she co-hosted the arte documentary series “Ach, Europa!”, and in 2020 she accompanied the ZDF documentary “Unforgettable – Our choir for people with dementia” she created during the Corona pandemic an interview documentary “#andwhyareyouhere” with 20 questions about the meaning of life, and she was also part of the recently shown ZDF long-term documentary “Literally Living”.
It’s about adults who finally want to learn to read and write. A topic that is very close to Frier’s heart. She has been an ambassador for the “Reading Foundation” for years; in 2020 she received the German Reading Prize in the “Special Prize for Prominent Commitment” category for her efforts. She always advocates for reading – even away from the camera. Last summer she visited the Adolf Kolping secondary school in her hometown of Cologne together with North Rhine-Westphalia Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst (48, CDU) and spoke to the reading club there.
Readings, children’s films, serious topics
Annette Frier is obviously interested in a broad spectrum. There is the humorous “Merz against Merz” series, which was shown on ZDF from 2019 to 2021 and at the end of September 2023, as well as readings in March on lit.COLOGNE. She appeared in children’s films such as “Jim Knopf”, “Lassie” and “Benjamin Blümchen”, but also took on the leading role in the contemporary adaptation of Theodor Storm’s (1817 -1888) “Die Schimmelreiter”, which will be broadcast on ZDF next year should.
Even though many people might associate her with “Wochenshow” and “LOL”, Frier has already taken on interesting, serious roles. The Sat.1 drama “Two Lives. One Hope” from 2016 was about the topic of organ donation. The film “Only a Handful of Lives,” which was shown on Erste in March 2026, dealt with the topics of the desire to have children, trisomy 18 and abortion. In spring 2018 and 2019 she played a woman with Asperger’s syndrome in the ZDF “Herzkino” series.
Her private life caused many astonished questions
She cannot be forced into a mold, even in her private life. The fact that her career only really began as a young mother is still somewhat unusual today. Just two years after the birth of her twins in 2008, she got her own series on Sat.1, “Danni Lowinski”, which brought her numerous awards such as the German Television Prize, the German Comedy Prize and the Jupiter Award and finally cemented her on TV world anchored.
The fact that her husband, the screenwriter Johannes Wunsch (born 1955), mainly looked after the children caused astonished faces – but was hardly an issue for Annette Frier herself. Her husband was able to work better from home and “was always responsible for the two of them,” she revealed in May 2022 the magazine “Bunte”.
“In the beginning I had to laugh a lot when I was asked: ‘So does your husband help you with the children?’ My answer was: ‘Yes. I help my husband with the children.’ That’s when I realized what fixed patterns we’re still stuck in as a society.” She continued: “I’m glad that our children wouldn’t even think of asking questions like that. I think that we really should say goodbye to these role clichés that only get in our way.” Frier and Wunsch have been married since 2002.