Other actors like to string together stories from the industry in their memoirs. Not Michaela May. She revealed her family’s unfathomable tragedy in her autobiography. After almost two years of reading trips with this book, which also took her to psychiatric clinics, she takes stock.
Michaela May enters the Oscar Maria Café, the sun rises. Two street corners away, a double-decker bus almost took her off her bike and dragged her along. “And Dieter Reiter also happened to be standing next to it on the sidewalk,” she says. A scene with a mayor like Helmut Dietl could have written. May had her breakthrough in 1974 with his “Munich Stories”. As Susi. This is how many of her admirers long for her to this day: sweet and carefree. When she published her autobiography “Behind the Smile” two years ago, she revealed a family fate that no one suspected. In the year of her Dietl success, her brother Karl took his own life. Three years later the eldest, Hans, followed him. And in 1982, Gundi, her younger sister, passed away at just 22 years old. The book has now been published in its fourth edition and she is still asked to give readings all over Germany.