Bless you! Radio doctor Marianne Koch turns 90 – media

With the “Landärztin” in Paul May’s film of the same name from 1958, Marianne Koch found the role of her life early on, a role whose content she will fulfill well beyond the end of her cinema career. As a young doctor who opens a practice in a small town, she has to fight the stubbornness of the locals in the film. She is dynamic, discreet, resolute and has the right diagnosis for everything. She still seems as confident and natural as in this film when she does her regular medical programs.

Mostly she has been doing this for more than twenty years Health talk on Bavaria 2. Calm, charming, confident, she explains wrong diets and recommends experts – “You need a good endocrinologist!”. Of course she has had to take a stand on viruses lately. She always seems so wise and confident that you like to listen to the program despite the sometimes far too detailed descriptions of her caller’s suffering. Having to do with people and medicine, Koch once said, be her dearest. So it does, in advice programs and books.

She never got along as an actress, medicine always came first

In 1955, however, Marianne Koch interrupted her medical studies and devoted herself to acting. She had worked for Bavaria in Munich in the first semesters, and was then quickly discovered – without any acting lessons. The breakthrough came with “Des Teufels General”, 1955, by Helmut Käutner. She plays an actress whom Curd Jürgens falls in love with as General Harras, and her laugh and her love are absolutely untouchable and pure in the man’s world of this film in which some are beastly stubborn Nazis and the others are fun-loving fighter pilots who drink cognac. The following year, Koch can be seen in dirndls, in “Salzburg Stories”, her name is Constanze, is a baroness and unabashedly fools the man she loves into thinking that she is a maid in a castle. In “The Last Chord”, an American melodrama by Douglas Sirk, filmed in Munich and Salzburg, she then tries to drown herself in Lake Starnberg.

Open detailed view

Don’t be fooled, the smart girl can very well be sexy, her smile mocking or even lascivious. In “Midnight Murderer”, 1961, by Georges Franju, she plays an heiress who rides through sultry nights and seduces the stable boy like a Lady Chatterley. In the sixties, Marianne Koch proved herself in adventure films, between Hong Kong, Manitoba and Santa Cruz, in TV thrillers, “Tim Frazer” and “Death Runs After”. And in the first major spaghetti western, Sergio Leone’s “For a Fistful of Dollars”, Marianne Koch and Clint Eastwood are two mute phantoms who scurry past each other. She resumes her studies in the early seventies. A fresh start? No, it is rather going back to the roots.

She never got along as an actress. Medicine has always come first for Koch since his early youth. Yes, traveling back then was nice, she says. But only temporarily, never as a calling. It was in medicine. At 54 she opened a practice and also worked as a medical journalist. In addition to the medical TV appearances, she also has a job quiz What am I? participated and the talk show 3 to 9 moderated. When she passed her first state examination at the age of 43, this day should be one of the most important of her life alongside the births of her two sons.

Today she says: “Of course you can go on living much better if you shape the life that is in front of you.” Her new book will be out in a few days. The title: “I’ll get old later.”