actress
Career despite setbacks: Heidelinde Weis is dead
The actress Heidelinde Weis came from Villach in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia. photo
© Ursula Düren/dpa
She became known for television roles in “Derrick”, “Traumschiff” and “Schwarzwaldklinik”. Heidelinde Weis was not deterred by serious illnesses. Now she has died.
Her death was confirmed to the German Press Agency on Friday evening. The broadcaster ORF and the “Kronen Zeitung” had previously reported on it.
Weis was born in Villach in the southern Austrian state of Carinthia in 1940 and got his first taste of the stage at the age of 14 in a school performance. She was trained as an actress at the renowned Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. “I think I learned this profession because I wanted to do theater,” she told ORF in 2008. Weis appeared on stages in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Munich, among others. At the Salzburg Festival she played alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Better guest roles than series star
Weis was known to television audiences from the television film “The Woman in White” and from series such as “Schwarzwaldklinik”. But she didn’t want to become a series star, but mainly played guest roles.
She revealed to the German Press Agency on her 80th birthday that she only took on some engagements for financial reasons: “Films that I only made to make money, to finance the fence around our large property.” What was important to her, however, were TV adaptations of plays by Shakespeare and Anouilh.
Strokes of fate could not dissuade Weis from her career. “You have to learn life – and accept everything that happens to you,” she told dpa. As a young woman, she suffered from multiple sclerosis and spent time in a wheelchair. She was also diagnosed with cancer three times and fought her way back to life three times. She cared for her sick husband, the theater producer Hellmuth Duna, for years. After his death in 1998, she appeared in front of the television cameras more often, including in Rosamunde Pilcher film adaptations.
“Acting great Heidelinde Weis wrote international theater, cinema and television history and also demonstrated her multifaceted talent as a singer and speaker,” said Austria’s Secretary of State for Culture Andrea Mayer on Saturday.
Awarded the German Record Prize
Weis recorded three albums as a singer in the 1970s. She didn’t really believe in her talent. When she was awarded the German Record Prize, she initially thought it was a misunderstanding, as she told ORF.
After spending almost her entire professional life in Germany, Weis returned to Villach a few years ago. She was still on stage in October: with Klaus Maria Brandauer at Vienna’s Burgtheater she read from the correspondence between the poet Christine Lavant and the painter Werner Berg.
“It was great”: Weis used these words to describe her career in 2020. But she was not a woman who lived in the past. Last year, Weis published her memoir, “The Best is Yet to Come.”