70th Birthday
When Jutta Speidel dropped out of school, success came – with a school comedy
Jutta Speidel with Thomas Fritsch (l.) and Herbert Herrmann in the series “Three are one too many”, which ran on ZDF in 1977
© United Archives / Imago Images
Many people know Jutta Speidel as an older woman from touching family series. But she already had success as a teenager. In her private life, she is committed to helping the homeless.
This career began at the end of the 1960s: Speidel first attracted attention as a 15-year-old extra: in 1969, alongside young star Hansi Kraus, in the hit film “The Louts from the First Bank – Pepe, the Timpani Terror”. Without further ado, Speidel was hired for further films. Many years later she is a renowned film, television and theater actress. This Tuesday Jutta Speidel turns 70.
However, the actress, who is known for her roles in successful television series such as “Forsthaus Falkenau” and “Um Himmels Willen,” has not yet thought about quitting. She continues to appear on stages and in front of cameras – and is responsible for managing the Horizont association, which she founded at her home in Munich, which runs shelters for homeless children and women.
Jutta Speidel: A childhood in Munich in the 1950s
“As an actress, I quit when I’m fed up,” Speidel made clear in an interview a few months ago. “But I still have a lot of fun with it.” She also doesn’t care much about her upcoming birthday. She experienced growing older for 70 years. “I will endure this for the next 20 years, or as long as God gives me.” Actually, “nothing changes,” the artist added.
Speidel was born on March 26, 1954 in Munich. Her father is an engineer and lawyer, and her mother is primarily a housewife. Even as a child she flirted with acting, but she had problems at school. She was expelled twice and ultimately left high school early without a high school diploma. It was during this time that she was discovered through the comedies in the “Lümmel” series.
Jutta Speidel turns 70 this Tuesday. The actress lives in Munich.
© Stephan Wallocha / Imago Images
Speidel completed acting and singing training and was able to demonstrate her talent as a character actress in theaters during this time. Her breakthrough came in the mid-70s. From 1977 she appeared in the ZDF series “Three are one too many”. She gained artistic stature through the lead role in the internationally successful scandal thriller “Fleisch” about an illegal organ trafficking mafia, which was released in 1979.
During this time, Speidel lived with various partners; between 1984 and 1994 she was married to the entrepreneur Stefan Feuerstein. The marriage also produced a daughter and she also has another daughter from a previous relationship. After the birth of her children, Speidel initially took a shorter career step before later taking on more roles again.
One of her professional mainstays remains leading and supporting roles in family and early evening series such as the ZDF productions “All My Daughters” and “Forsthaus Falkenau”. Between 2002 and 2006, she played a good-natured nun alongside Fritz Wepper in the popular ARD series “For Heaven’s Sake”. For this she received the Bavarian Film Prize.
Appearance as “Walrus Waltraut” on “The Masked Singer”
She also appears in numerous television film productions – in crime novels and dramas as well as in tragic comedies such as the production “Club of the Lonely Hearts”, which was broadcast on ARD in 2019, in which she appears together with Uschi Glas and Hannelore Elsner. Speidel is also up for unconventional experiments: in 2022, the actress will take part in the ProSieben celebrity singing show “The Masked Singer” dressed as “Walrus Waltraut”.
Between 2003 and 2013, Speidel, who still lives in Munich, was in a relationship with the Italian actor Bruno Maccallini. Since 1997, a large part of her time has also been spent on the Horizont association she founded, which runs two residential and shelter homes for homeless women and their children in Munich. A third house is currently being built.
The idea came to Speidel when she once read in a homeless magazine about the fate of homeless children in her hometown of Munich. “That shocked me,” she said in an interview. And she doesn’t just stop at representative tasks, but instead becomes a full-time entrepreneur and manages the club, which has now grown to around 60 employees.
Personally, Speidel emphasized in a recent interview that she benefited enormously from this task beyond acting: she learned “a lot of independence” from it, which is why she quit her artist agency a long time ago. In general, she can’t complain about loneliness, she says in another interview: “I have so many full-time jobs.”
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