The richly blessed ARD series comprised twenty seasons For heaven’s sake from January 2002 to June 2021, and it was a fun tradition to have almost every one end with a benefit gala. Fritz Wepper alias Mayor Wolfgang Wöller and Janina Hartwig as sister Hanna, the patente super nun of Kloster Kaltenthal, then put aside all the issues of the previous episodes for the sake of the good cause and made an appearance together in front of an audience.
Sometimes it was a tango, sometimes a scene from the musical Beauty and the Beast, they also rapped and quilted. In the initial phase, to crown the end of the season in 2003, the provincial prince Wöller in Elvis costume even played the king and rocked the booth with an open shirt front and hot pelvis. Elvis Wepper the Pelvis – a climax that the final series finale in episode 260 does not come close to. Wöller sings in a duet with his sister Hanna the unshakable Dirty Dancing-Hit “The Time of my Life”, but seated and noticeably stiff voice and hip (all episodes are available in the ARD media library). How should twenty years of series and life not pass you by without a trace? as For heaven’s sake started, Fritz Wepper was 60, this Tuesday he will be 80 years old.
In the fictional Kaltenthal, the crowd favorite experiences the best time of his life
With his permanent role as the would-be mayor in the fictional town of Kaltenthal, constantly spinning some intrigues, the crowd favorite Wepper actually had the time of his life, the best time of his life, at least the second half of his life – after he had previously worked with his criminal police assistant roles in The commissioner (1969-1976) and Derrick (1974-1998) had proven to be a TV long-distance runner. Wepper has never felt that the story of the smart nuns, who have to permanently defend their monastery against the investment ideas of the provincial peppones, could run out of steam after twenty years and that the age-related noticeably ailing Wöller might have deserved retirement. When the show was canceled that year, he reacted with incomprehension and melancholy. To say goodbye, his Wöller was re-elected in the final episode, said number 260, according to his motto: “Where there is a Wöller, there is a way.” However, this exit should not be viewed as a cliffhanger.
The Gschaftlhuber Wöller was also a prime role for Fritz Wepper because he was able to live out his comic talent close to the people. He has often named the great curmudgeon Walter Matthau as his role model, knowing: “Comedy is a dead serious job”, a deadly serious matter. In Wepper’s implementation this means: Bavarian grumbling with a dash of shrewdness and the heart always in the right place.
The young Fritz Wepper writing autographs.
(Photo: Fritz Fischer / picture alliance / dpa)
Born in Munich on August 17, 1941 at the Maillingerstraße bus stop, the native of Munich never trained to be an actor. He was discovered as a high school student with red hair and freckles at the age of eleven for the theater (“Peter Pan” at the Residenztheater) and has worked as an actor ever since. At the age of 18 he appeared in Bernhard Wicki’s award-winning anti-war film in 1959 The bridge with – a milestone in his 66-year film and television career. Wepper played the student Albert Mutz, who was drafted into the Wehrmacht with six friends in April 1945 and defended a bridge in a deadly senseless battle. He received fan mail in the basket.
In 1969 came the role that will be forever associated with Fritz Wepper, and it is not known that he would have considered it a curse: Harry Klein, the eternal assistant, who first worked alongside Erik for 97 episodes Ode in the ZDF classic The commissioner investigated and then for 24 years – in 281 episodes sold worldwide – the friendly, preppy assistant inspector at the side of Horst Tappert in Derrick was. The subordinate figure has cult status in fan circles and is celebrated for a sentence that was symptomatic but literally never uttered: “Harry, get the car.”
For his series engagements with ZDF, Fritz Wepper even offered the possibility of a Hollywood career. After his impersonation of the Jew Fritz Wendel in Bob Fosses with eight Oscars heaped musical film “Cabaret” (1972) there were offers (and Liza Minnelli still calls him “my dear friend”). But Wepper stayed true to his Harry and the German audience. This thanked him with the highest spikes on the popularity scale and ratings that others can only dream of.
1970 as a dashing assistant in the crime series “Der Kommissar” with Reinhard Glemnitz and Monika Lundi.
(Photo: imago / United Archives)
Fritz Wepper also proved himself to be a marathon man in the German crime thriller in the series that he shot with his family members. With his three years younger brother Elmar he went from 1994 to 2001 in the ZDF series Two brothers on the hunt for criminals; with his daughter Sophie in the ARD series Murder in good company (2007-2017). In both formats, he did not investigate as a police officer, but as a hobby criminologist from the upper middle class. Inner-family squabbles were just as much a part of it as the leisurely pace of the investigation. They weren’t upset.
While his brother Elmar has been filming since Doris Dörries at the latest Cherry blossoms – hanami increasingly profiled as a character actor, Fritz Wepper no longer had to work as a serial entertainment provider. He is loved for the down-to-earth type of average person, whom for most he embodies personally.
Wepper, who lives at Tegernsee, has never kept his private life behind the mountain. The fact that he first left his wife Angela, who died in 2019, and then returned to her could be found in the tabloids as well as his hobbies (such as fly fishing) or his sick leave. It is also known that Wepper has cancer and was in the intensive care unit in Innsbruck for weeks this spring.
In his autobiography “An Eternal Moment”, which has just been published by Heyne-Verlag, he gives further insight into his life, tells of his work, his marriage, his affairs (also with Iris Berben). The camerawoman and director Susanne Kellermann, with whom he fathered a daughter nine years ago, Wepper married quietly in 2019. Under the title My Fritz did she shoot a documentary about him, a highly personal portrait of his age, can be seen in the BR and ARD media library. In the end, Wepper is stylized as a meditation Buddha. The “life in the here and now”, which he ponders philosophically about, sitting cross-legged, will be granted to him for a long time to come.