Austrian actress Christiane Hörbiger died on Wednesday at the age of 84. This was confirmed by a long-time employee and a family friend of the German Press Agency, after the Wiener Zeitung first courier had reported.
Hörbiger was born in 1938 as the middle child of the famous couple Attila Hörbiger and Paula Wessely in Vienna. Hörbiger celebrated her debut in front of the television camera when she was only 17 years old. After graduating from school, she broke off her training at the renowned Max Reinhardt Seminar after only four weeks because of an offer for a film. A little later, Hörbiger appeared on the stage of the Vienna Burgtheater for the first time as Recha in Lessing’s “Nathan the Wise”. However, the reviews for her performance were scathing.
Hörbiger then made a name for herself as a serious artist at various theaters such as Heidelberg and Zurich. Eventually she even returned to the Burgtheater as Recha and was celebrated for her performance. In the 1970s she played the paramour in “Jedermann” at the Salzburg Festival several times, thus solidifying a family tradition. Both her parents and her sister were already on stage at the Domplatz in Salzburg.
Hörbiger became known to a wide audience in the 1980s with the television series “The Legacy of the Guldenburgs”. As a judge in the Austrian-German series “Julia – Eine Unusual Frau” she reached an audience of millions for five seasons around the turn of the millennium. She received a lot of praise for her portrayal of Göring’s niece Freya von Hepp in Helmut Dietl’s award-winning cult satire “Schtonk”. Hörbiger also celebrated successes with the legal drama “Die Gejurenen”, the thriller “Die Gottesanbeterin” or the Dürrenmatt literary adaptation “The Visit of the Old Lady”.
In the course of her career, Hörbiger was honored with the Bavarian Television Prize for her life’s work, the Karl Valentin Order, the Ernst Lubitsch Prize and the German Television Prize. Her first marriage was to the director Wolfgang Glück. Her second husband and father of her son Sascha, the Swiss journalist Rolf R. Bigler, died in 1978. The actress found a new partner in the Viennese director and author Gerhard Tötschinger, who died in 2016.
Hörbiger lived in Baden near Vienna in the last years of her life. In 2019, a video caused a stir in which Hörbiger, previously known as an SPÖ sympathizer, raised her voice for the young ÖVP Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who has since resigned.