On Monday she would have celebrated her 78th birthday, but Gertraud Jesserer should no longer have it. The popular Austrian actress was killed in an apartment fire on Thursday evening. Her son Michael Vogel announced her death to the Austrian press agency APA on Friday; Third-party debt, it was said, should be ruled out. What an end! The Viennese Gertraud Jesserer, born on February 13, 1943, has been on stage in her hometown for 60 years and was one of the great actors in Austria. After leaving the Max Reinhardt Seminar prematurely, she made her debut in Molnár’s “Liliom” in 1960 at the Theater in der Josefstadt, where she was part of the ensemble until 1969. Her next engagement with Ivan Nagel at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg was only a short trip to the neighboring country. She came back in 1973 and from then on belonged to the Vienna Burgtheater until she retired.
At the castle she worked with directors such as Otto Schenk, Johannes Schaaf, Achim Benning and Alfred Kirchner. She played Marianne in Horváth’s “Tales from the Vienna Woods” and Karoline in “Kasimir und Karoline”, was Marie in Schnitzler’s “Call of Life” and Polly in the “Threepenny Opera”. She was awarded the Kainz Medal in 1974 for her sensitive, multi-faceted art of representation. Even decades later, Viennese theatergoers praised their Maria in Musil’s “Die Schwärmer”, which she played in 1981 under the direction of Erwin Axer. At her side is the no less celebrated Erika Pluhar – like her, Jesserer was in a relationship with André Heller for a while. C. Bernd Sucher wrote in the SZ about her Jenna in Lars Norén’s “Demons”, directed by Dieter Giesing in 1985: “The Jesserer has tremendous power, an animal-like, strong charisma.”
In addition to her delicate nature as a character actress, she also had that: something powerfully energetic, sometimes almost imperious. The great actor director Luc Bondy knew how to get that out of her. For example, when he staged Molière’s “Tartuffe” when he left Vienna in 2013, with an all-star ensemble, starting with Gert Voss as Orgon, through Joachim Meyerhoff in the title role, to the otherwise noble Edith Clever in the (upgraded) role of the housemaid Dorine. Gertraud Jesserer, sitting in a very sophisticated wheelchair as a Jeanne Moreau blend, was old Madame Pernelle: Ordering everyone around and shouting, she was the real terrorist and fundamentalist in the house.
Even when she made guest appearances at other theaters, at the Stuttgart State Theater, at the Salzburg Festival or at her first stage, the Josefstädter Theater – where she played the dogged professor widow in Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” in 2010 – the Burgtheater was and remained her artistic home. In 2018 she was seen there again in the geriatric play that Luk Perceval staged in the Akademietheater based on the novel “The Librarian Who Would Rather Be Demented than at Home with His Wife” by Dimitri Verhulst. And finally, in 2019, in Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s text collage “At the time of the Queen Mother”.
Gertraud Jesserer owes her popularity above all to her numerous roles in film and television. Already at the age of 14 she was in Rolf Thiele’s “Die Halbzarte” in front of the camera, as the younger sister of Romy Schneider. In almost 100 episodes of the ORF impromptu series “Familie Leitner” (1958-1967), an early form of the soap opera, she was part of the role as Gerda. In his private life, Jesserer’s life was marked by strokes of fate. Her ex-husband Peter Vogel committed suicide in 1978. Her son Nikolas died in 1991 during a bomb attack as a war correspondent and photographer at Ljubljana Airport. It is tragic that she died in a fire at the age of 77.