Actress Elisabeth Trissenaar dies

Published: Monday, Jan 15th 2024, 15:40

The actress Elisabeth Trissenaar, who also became famous for her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has died.

The Austrian died on Sunday evening at the age of 79 in Berlin's Charité hospital, as lawyer Peter Raue announced on Monday on behalf of the family of her husband Hans Neuenfels (1941-2022).

The daughter of a singing student and a Dutch doctor, Trissenaar was born in Vienna on April 13, 1944. She met her future husband, director Neuenfels, during her acting training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. Their son Benedict, who is a successful cameraman ("The Counterfeiters"), was born in 1966.

Her first theater work took Trissenaar and Neuenfels to Krefeld. She performed in Bochum and with Peter Palitzsch at the Staatstheater Stuttgart. Trissenaar worked at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zürich and the Schauspiel Köln. In Berlin, she worked with Neuenfels at the Volksbühne from 1985 to 1990 and from 2001 onwards at the Deutsches Theater.

At the Salzburg Festival, Trissenaar played the Buhlschaft in "Jedermann" several times. She has played great female characters such as Ibsen's "Nora" and "Hedda Gabler", Kleist's "Penthesilea" and Euripides' "Elektra", Gretchen in Goethe's "Faust", Varya in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard", Lessing's "Emilia Galotti" and Strindberg's "Miss Julie".

In Fassbinder's "Bolwieser" in 1976, Trissenaar played the unfaithful wife of a stationmaster. She also appeared in his works "In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden" (1978), "Die Ehe der Maria Braun" (1979) and as Lina in the film adaptation of Döblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980). She did not play smooth roles, but women with rough edges and neuroses.

She filmed with Doris Dörrie ("Keiner liebt mich"), Robert van Ackeren ("Das andere Lächeln"), Agnieszka Holland ("Bittere Ernte") and Rainer Kaufmann ("Kalt ist der Abendhauch"). She was in front of the camera for Michael Herbig in "Die Geschichte vom Brandner Kaspar" and shot "So glücklich war ich noch nie" alongside Devid Striesow and Nadja Uhl.

The Austrian playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature Elfriede Jelinek created the play "Jackie and Other Princesses" for Trissenaar, in which she played the role of the Kennedy widow Jackie O. at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. The play was directed by her husband Neuenfels - as in dozens of other joint productions.

©Keystone/SDA

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