Jutta Speidel celebrates her 70th birthday and looks back on a successful career. This is how she became a popular TV star.
“The actor wins the heart, but he does not give his heart away,” said the poet laureate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. And the writer, screenwriter and film director Norman Mailer, †84, said that actors are “people who only really listen when you talk about them.”
Goethe lived almost 200 years before Jutta Speidel, 70, and the American Norman Mailer most likely never met her, otherwise he would have formulated his opinion about the apparently natural unity of acting and vanity differently.
Jutta Speidel: “I hate the red carpet”
Jutta Speidel is an actress, one of the most successful in the country. But she doesn’t have it at all with the big and small vanities that come with her job. On the contrary: such appearances are alien to her nature. “I hate the red carpet. The masters of the production are like icons on it, aloof, unnatural. That’s not my world,” she said in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. On March 26th, Jutta Speidel will be 70 years old. One look at her face says everything about this woman: all real life lines, nothing artificial, smoothed and certainly not lifted. Lived life.
Jutta Speidel during a TV appearance.
© imago/Stephan Wallocha
And when she speaks, it is Jutta Speidel who is speaking and not the star of films and television, but rather her own, unadulterated self. Unconventional, sometimes uncomfortable. Mainstream isn’t her thing at all: “If I represent a cause, I can be merciless.” Her motto in life is to “go through the world courageously, without thinking: What risk am I taking?” is how she explains her personality in a “Lifeline” portrait by Bayerischer Rundfunk. Jutta Speidel is a cheerful person who you can appreciate when he says: “I like living so much!” When she laughs, “she sounds like an amused teenager” (SZ). And she likes to laugh a lot.
Her career started early
After a carefree childhood as the daughter of a Munich patent attorney, she wanted to become an actress. At the age of three she was allowed to appear as an extra in the Schliersee Farmers’ Theater. At 15, she became an extra in the third episode of “The Louts from the First Bank”.
In 1973 she left high school with her secondary school leaving certificate and went to a Munich drama school for three years. Even before she graduated, the important director Rainer Erler hired her for her first leading role in the feature film “The Last Holidays”. She was 20 then. In 1979, Erler also cast her as the female lead in the feature film “Fleisch”, which was about organ trafficking. It was Jutta Speidel’s first international appearance. From then on she appeared in over 50 films, played in successful TV series such as “Three are one too many”, “Rivalen der Rennbahn”, “Forsthaus Falkenau”, “All my daughters” and “For heaven’s sake”, most recently ” Days that didn’t exist.” She became one of the most popular German TV stars, but also played on numerous stages such as the Renaissance Theater in Berlin, in Vienna and Munich, and received audience awards such as Bambi and the Bavarian Television Prize.
That’s what Jutta Speidel’s book is about
Now she has also become an author; her first novel has just been published. Jutta Speidel originally wanted to write a film exposé, but had difficulty accommodating the material. At the funeral of the writer and TV author Barbara Noack in 2023, she met the publisher Michael Fleissner from Langen Müller Verlag Munich and whispered in his ear: “I’m writing a novel.” Fleissner took action.
“Amaryllis” is the story of a woman in the complicated world of artists. “The circus is a male domain,” writes the author, who also says about her industry: “Unfortunately, the male perspective is often the measure of things.”
In an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” magazine, Jutta Speidel (together with her colleagues Michaela May and Gisela Schneeberger) complains about the monotony of the TV stories broadcast and the fact that women her age are not offered suitable roles. “Those who promote film, the television editors, the directors are responsible. They obviously don’t know any old women – and if they do, then they’ve never really listened to them. That’s ignorance. Disrespect and ignorance.”
She cites the successful series “For Heaven’s Sake” as an example: “I was very lucky that I went in a completely different direction with ‘For Heaven’s Sake’, a television series in which I played a nun. One without make-up Nun! Everyone else suddenly seemed to have makeup on and looked as if they had been lifted. But then a nun’s story became a mayor’s story – with nuns. What great material that would have been if we just looked at what nuns can do! But it is It’s always so incredibly important that men are there.” She left in 2006 after 65 episodes.
Your heart project Horizont eV
When she was in her late 40s, she set out on a completely new path. The children were out of the house, I got a second wind. I had more energy and time and desire, more than when I was in my mid-30s. I’m a businesswoman and now have 56 employees. I never see a story like that in the movies. This second breath that many women get – and not because their husband left them or because he died. But simply because of themselves.”
Jutta Speidel founded the Horizont eV association in 1997, with which she looks after homeless children and mothers as well as socially disadvantaged families. With her own energy she has built two houses in Munich with a total of 72 apartments, and a third shelter with 57 places and a trauma and therapy center is being planned. She has also received numerous awards for this social project.
Speidel is a mother of two
Jutta Speidel has two adult daughters from two men. She doesn’t mention Franziska’s father’s name; the younger Antonia is an opera singer. She comes from her marriage to the Munich timber merchant Stefan Feuerstein, 68. Speidel was previously in a relationship with the actor Herbert Herrmann, 82. In her last relationship with the Italian actor Bruno Maccallini, 64, she commuted between Munich and Rome.
She carelessly talks about her time as a young actress in the “SZ”: “We were wild and mainly wanted to have fun… Everyone had something with everyone else. Almost like in Truffaut’s ‘American Night’: everyone got involved with everyone the box. And today? It’s so stuffy!”
Her daughters would ask her today, “When you were in your 20s, did you have trouble finding boys?” “No,” she answers, “I always had several. I always fell in love. A few weeks or months, then the next one came… There were enough nice people, it was easier and more carefree back then.”
Jutta Speidel has been single for eleven years. After appearing on the Vox show “Celebrity First Dates” a few weeks ago, one got the impression that she was looking for a partner. You saw on TV how she met Franz, who was four years younger than her. According to “Bild”, she later made it clear that she was by no means looking for a new love: “I only took part in this dating show because of my club ‘Horizont’, but that was edited out of the show. I wasn’t on any dating platforms – and he was an actor. The whole thing was fake!”
Sources used: sueddeutsche.de, br.de, bild.de