actress
“Martha” star Margit Carstensen died at the age of 83
Actress Margit Carstensen died at the age of 83. photo
© Annette Riedl//dpa
Fassbinder’s film “Martha” made her famous: Even afterwards she often played mysterious women who were caught in power games and hysteria. Now Margit Carstensen has died.
She was one of the muses of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In “Tatort – What it’s worth living for” (2016) Margit Carstensen stood in front of the camera for the last time with her colleagues. To say goodbye to Eva Mattes as Commissioner Klara Blum from Lake Constance, they came together again: in addition to Eva Mattes and Margit Carstensen, Irm Hermann and Hanna Schygulla, who played a curious trio of old ladies who become murderers for moral and ethical reasons.
Margit Carstensen died on Thursday at the age of 83 in a hospital in Heide (Schleswig-Holstein), according to her agent, citing the family.
For many years, Carstensen lived in seclusion in a small village near Heide. The actress had retired there after having lived in Mallorca for a few years. After her husband died, she lived here alone with her dogs. For a long time she could no longer take roles because she was not feeling well. For years, the heavy smoker had suffered from pulmonary emphysema, which made it difficult for her to breathe.
An exception
In 2019 Margit Carstensen was honored in Berlin with the Götz George Prize for her life’s work. At that time, the jury praised her as “an exceptional phenomenon in the German theater and film landscape, unique in her intense, unconditional acting, her boundary-breaking performance and her concentration, which forces the audience to listen and without exception casts a spell over her”.
Margit Carstensen was born on February 29, 1940 in Kiel and grew up there. Even as a child she loved music and poetry, but was very introverted. “I glowed inside, but didn’t let anything out,” said Carstensen on her 80th birthday to the German Press Agency.
At the University of Music and Theater in Hamburg, “a world opened up to her and I had to open myself up”. After stints at various theaters, Carstensen was a member of the ensemble at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus from 1965 to 1969. In 1969 she moved to Bremen, where she met the charismatic playwright and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982).
“Fassbinder was a great poet, poet and visionary – with incredible charisma and incredible power,” she told dpa in early 2020. Fassbinder was always “a soft, lovable person” to her. “I was very lucky that he wanted to do it with me,” she says.
Cooperation with Fassbinder and Schlingensief
Carstensen became known for her leading role in the Fassbinder film “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” (1972), for which she received the film ribbon in gold. Her embodiment of the humiliated wife in “Martha” (1974) alongside Karlheinz Böhm as a morbidly domineering man was also impressive. In other films too, Carstensen often played masochistic women caught up in power games and hysteria.
Years of artistic collaboration also connected her with Christoph Schlingensief (1960-2010), in whose film “100 Years Adolf Hitler – The Last Hour in the Fuehrer Bunker” (1989) she embodied Magda Goebbels and in his media persiflage “Terror 2000” (1992 ) she played a detective. In “The 120 Days of Bottrop” (1997) she more or less mimed herself on a meta level – the Schlingensief film was about the former Fassbinder entourage.
Under the direction of Leander Haussmann, Carstensen was also able to show her comic side, for example in his film adaptation of the ex-GDR comedy “Sonnenallee” (1999) as a tight-lipped school principal.
She received the Bavarian Film Prize in 2003 for her role as an alcoholic and neglected mother in Chris Kraus’ film drama “Scherbentanz” (2002). In “Finsterworld” (2013) by Frauke Finsterwalder, she played an old lady in a retirement home, to whom a pedicurist (Michael Maertens) cheers the removed flakes of skin in biscuits the next time she visits.
Margit Carstensen at her agency