At 79 years old
Actress Elisabeth Trissenaar dies
The actress Elisabeth Trissenaar died at the age of 79 in the Charité hospital in Berlin. photo
© Britta Pedersen/dpa-Zentralbild/dpa
The Viennese native has played on all major stages and appeared in countless films. Now Elisabeth Trissenaar has died.
The actress Elisabeth Trissenaar, who also became known for her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is dead. The Austrian died on Sunday evening at the age of 79 in Berlin’s Charité hospital, as lawyer Peter Raue announced 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 on April 13, 1944 in Vienna. She met her future husband, the director, during her acting training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna Know Neuenfels. In 1966 their son Benedict was born, who is successful as a cameraman (“The Falsifiers”).
The first theater works took Trissenaar and Neuenfels to Krefeld. She played in Bochum and with Peter Palitzsch at the Stuttgart State Theater. Trissenaar worked at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Schauspiel Köln. In Berlin she worked with Neuenfels at the Volksbühne from 1985 to 1990, and from 2001 she played at the Deutsches Theater.
At the Salzburg Festival, Trissenaar was featured in “Everyman” several times. She 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 “Fräulein”. “Julie”.
In Fassbinder’s “Bolwieser” in 1976, Trissenaar played the unfaithful wife of a station master. She was also seen in his works “In a Year with 13 Moons” (1978), “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979) and as Lina in the film adaptation of Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980). She didn’t play smooth roles, but rather women with rough edges and neuroses.
She filmed with Doris Dörrie (“Nobody Loves Me”), Robert van Ackeren (“The Other Smile”), Agnieszka Holland (“Bitter Harvest”) and Rainer Kaufmann (“Cold is the Evening Breath”). She appeared in front of the camera for Michael Herbig in “The Story of Brandner Kaspar” and filmed “I’ve Never Been So Happy” 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 Kennedy’s widow Jackie O. at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. As in dozens of other joint productions, it was directed by husband Neuenfels.