Actress Hannelore Elsner would have been 80 on July 26. A look back at her dazzling life in front of the camera.
There was that adorable smile crowned by the wrinkles around her eyes. It could ignite or break hearts and was so engaging it almost hurt. “Nobody, really nobody in the whole wide world could resist this smile”, as director Doris Dörrie (67) described it.
It is remembered so vividly, as if the actress Hannelore Elsner, who died in 2019 and would have celebrated her 80th birthday on July 26, was still with us. This smile worked like a force field and was her best protection against chaos and vulnerability, which Hanni, as her friends called her, often had to live with.
The dramatist Moritz Rinke (54) experienced such a moment in 2000. He had arranged a stage performance with 2,000 children, the Scorpions, the Buena Vista Social Club and the then Chancellor for the world exhibition in Hanover, which Hannelore Elsner was supposed to moderate, which was catastrophic went in his pants. Not least because the stage manager was “drunk”, as Rinke described it in the “Tagesspiegel”, and the “old gentlemen from the Buena Vista Social Club from Cuba cried after falling over the Scorpions’ musical instruments”.
The most insane scene came when Rinke wrote a much too long introduction for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (78), but he had received the wrong sign from the stage manager and appeared much too early. Elsner continued to moderate him, but the Chancellor said: “But Ms. Elsner, I’ve been here for a long time! She replied: “I don’t care at all!”
“And there was that fabulous smile again”
Then the Scorpions “demolished” the stage and co-moderator Max Raabe (59) began to sing his lyrics. “Hannelore Elsner was already sitting in front of a mirror in the dressing room when I ran to her in a panic with some text changes. ‘I’m ruining myself,’ she said quietly. And there was that fabulous smile again, which she for a moment over a distraught, wonderfully beautiful face.”
Of course, she didn’t ruin herself, on the contrary: From the year 2000 onwards, her career really picked up speed again. Hannelore Elsner became one of the best actresses in films with a cult character alongside her colleagues Senta Berger (81) and Iris Berben (71). In “The Untouchables” (2000) by Oskar Roehler (63), she played his mother, the writer Gisela Elsner, who is called Hanna Flanders in the film.
In “My Last Film” (2002) by Oliver Hirschbiegel (64), she shone in a 90-minute monologue, in the comedy “Alles auf Zucker” (2004) by Dani Levy (64) as the Jewish wife of a notorious gambler, in ” Der Grosse Rudolph” (2018), she demonstrated her ingenious versatility as the mother of the Munich fashion designer Rudolph Moshammer. Another highlight of her life’s work was “Cherry Blossoms – Hanami” (2008), the story of the terminally ill Rudi (Elmar Wepper, 78), whose wife Trudi died unexpectedly before him.
A tribute to her grandmother
Director Doris Dörries told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, as she negotiated with Elsner. “She can’t really make friends with Trudi, when I ask her to do the role Bavarian, she says, I can’t, that’s absolutely not possible. – But Trudi comes from Bavaria, it has to be. – Her is silent for a long time, then she smiles her famous lightning smile… and says: ‘Okay, then I’ll play my grandma.'”
She was born in Burghausen in the Bavarian province. As a child she only spoke Bavarian, and it was so difficult to break the habit of the dialect. She then never took on a Bavarian role again. But then came Trudi, which she wanted to play as a tribute to her grandmother. “My grandmother was a farmer’s daughter from Lower Bavaria with a long braid,” she said in an interview the “Emma” editor Alice Schwarzer (79). She loved her grandma very much. “Everything was safe and beautiful with her.”
She has never forgotten the smell of early apples. “Or when there was a thunderstorm. And when they fell down like that. And there was a flower garden and a vegetable garden and a salad garden. And the meadows. In the little house there was an outhouse and goats, chickens and geese. I drank lukewarm goat’s milk. This For me childhood had something bright, something wild, something very archaic.”
Heavy blows of fate
The idyllic image of childhood is also determined by tragic moments. Then there is the death of Manfred, who was three years his senior, in early 1945. He was six and on his way from Burghausen to Neuötting to see his grandmother when low-flying aircraft attacked the train. Six projectiles were found in Manfred’s small body, which she kept in a linen bag. Later said Hannelore Elsner the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”: “My memories have faded, but the feelings are there. An incredible feeling of abandonment in my heart. It was an unspeakable pain in the family.”
Then the father got sick, tuberculosis. She is eight when he dies. “I still remember exactly how I sat on his deathbed in my first communion dress, all night. This endless longing for me for the great prince is logical. My brother was my prince. And then my father was my prince. And they just get out…” she described her feelings in an interview with Alice Schwarzer.
When she moved to Munich with her mother and after dropping out of high school, she was spotted on the street by a young Turkish director: “He was in love with me, but he was too old for me, he was 24. We rehearsed for weeks, it no movie ever came out of it.” After all, the film company sent her to an acting school, the first offers came, she acted in theater and had appearances in films such as “Freddy unter Fremden Sternen” (1959), “Allotria in Zell am See” (1963) or “Die Lümmel von der Erste Bench” (1967).
your loves
She was married to the actor Gerd Vespermann from 1964 to 1966, and around 1970 she is said to have had another marriage with her colleague Michael Miller. She also had a relationship with the Austrian filmmaker Alf Breastellin, which ended in 1981 with his accidental death in a Munich taxi. In between, she had a short relationship with the recently deceased director Dieter Wedel (1939-2022), from whom she had her son Dominik in 1981. A longer relationship with the producer Bernd Eichinger (1949-2011), a marriage with the theater dramaturge Uwe B. Carstensen (1973-2000) and a love for the literature professor Günter Blamberger followed.
“Bernd Eichinger was the best,” she said to Alice Schwarzer. “He didn’t restrict me at all. He actually loves it when you speak his mind. He was in love with me and respected me. He didn’t stuff me with all that love kitsch either. And when I said: No, today not – then I could say that. Without fear of loss.”
As her son Dominik reported after her death, Hannelore Elsner had been suffering from breast cancer since the mid-1990s. She even addressed the disease as an actress in “End of the Season” (2001) when she played a mother with cancer – and nobody on the set knew how the leading actress was doing. In her last film “Long Live the Queen” she also played a dying cancer patient. She even had to lie down in a coffin. Hannelore Elsner died while the film was still being shot.
Director Dieter Wedel, who has been accused of rape several times, said of his son Dominik’s mother: “When she laughed, the room lit up. And all the men fell at her feet.” She never returned that compliment. “No, Wedel is not Dominik’s father, he is his father.”