Caroline Peters on starting a career
“Rejected from every acting school”
Caroline Peters looks back on her rocky start as an actress.
© imago images/SKATA
TV viewers know Caroline Peters from “Murder with a View”. But despite her later successes, her early career was rocky.
Caroline Peters, 51, is an integral part of the German TV and film landscape. Most television viewers should know the actress as Commissioner Sophie Haas from the successful ARD comedy series “Mord mit Aussicht”. Peters has also been awarded a Grimme Prize, the Bavarian Film Prize and the German Acting Prize in the past. Despite her later successes, however, the start of her career was anything but easy, as Peters has now revealed in an interview with the “Bild” newspaper.
Caroline Peters: “Was totally discouraged”
The native of Mainz applied to a total of seven drama schools after graduating from high school – but she was not accepted at any of them. “I was totally discouraged and completely served after these seven cancellations and had no idea what I wanted to do instead,” Peters looks back on the challenging time at the time.
The turning point was a call from the Saarbrücken drama school, where the actress was supposed to learn her craft. “I was on the waiting list, someone dropped out and I still got the place,” said Peters.
“I began to have doubts as to whether this job was right for me”
But even after this first success, the entry into the acting profession proved to be rocky. Although Peters was able to get his first engagement at the Berlin Schaubühne in 1995, he did not act in view of the great actors there, such as Bruno Ganz, Peter Simonischek or Jutta Lampe. “That’s why I got to know the bars and clubs in Berlin. Everything was so cheap back then, including the rent. I didn’t earn anything, but I didn’t need a lot of money either,” remembers Peters, who later worked at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, among other places in Hamburg, at the Volksbühne Berlin and the Vienna Burgtheater.
Her latest feature film “The Uncertainty Relation of Love” will be released in German cinemas on June 29th. In the romantic comedy, Peters plays alongside co-star Burghart Klaußner (“The White Ribbon – A German Children’s Story”, 73).