born on July 26, 1942 in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria, Germany
died on April 21, 2019 in Munich, Germany
German actor
5th anniversary of her death on April 21, 2024
Biography
“You only need to watch my movies to learn everything there is to know about me. In that respect I’m completely transparent – there’s simply nothing more about myself that I could reveal.”
This was Hannelore Elsner’s reply to questions about her private life for a long time. Yet later she did indeed reveal more about herself; her candid autobiography, Im Überschwang (In Exuberance), was published in 2011.
She was born in Burghausen in 1942. After the death of her brother and father, she grew up in boarding school and with her grandparents. She went to drama school in Munich, where she also played her first roles in the theater.
She was only 17 when she made her film debut in Freddy unter fremden Sternen (Freddy under Foreign Stars). From 1959 to 1968, she appeared in no fewer than 10 feature films and 33 television productions. In the 1970s, she was frequently seen in quality films, working with her partner Alf Brustellin, Edgar Reitz and Dieter Wedel, among others. This was followed by over 200 television productions of varying quality. She did not shy away from light entertainment, but almost always sought out strong female roles. In 1994 she played a female police commissioner who wore short skirts in the very successful television series Die Kommissarin (The Police Commissioner), which made her one of the first women to play a senior police officer on German television.
She herself could not understand why for many years she was only offered roles that matched neither her potential nor her quality standards. The reason, according to Die Zeit in 1998, was that there were no more leading roles for women of her age. This changed - at least for Hannelore Elsner - with Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go) in 2000. She received the German Film Award for her performance as the writer Hanna Flanders (alias Gisela Elsner). The film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and won prizes at film festivals in Istanbul, Rotterdam and Miami. After that national and international success, she appeared in one excellent film after another. She was cast in brilliant roles by young directors. The writer Bodo Kirchhoff, who had also written scripts for several episodes of Die Kommissarin, wrote Mein letzter Film (My Last Film) for Hannelore Elsner, which Oliver Hirschbiegel filmed with her in the leading role. She showcased her talent for comedy in Dani Levy's Alles auf Zucker! as a blonde from Berlin who falls into the clutches of her husband's Jewish family.
“When I look back, it seems to me that developing period — with all of the inner winding and unwinding needed before I finally emerged fully developed like a butterfly from a caterpillar — took me such a long time. But today I can say that for me it is a very wonderful time,” she remarked in October 2004.
Hannelore Elsner died of cancer on April 21, 2019.
(Text from 2006, updated in 2012 and 2019; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
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