“I’ve got used to the comfort of being alone,” said Heide Keller in a recent interview, referring to the new situation after the end of her “period of service”. At the beginning of 2017, she said goodbye to Dream ship announced, ZDF’s successful series that shuttles around the world, in which she played hostess, later chief hostess Beatrice von Ledebur, from the start, since 1981. 38 years of service, that’s a record on German television. Of course, she herself decided when to say goodbye, “I wanted to disembark while I can still leave the gangway in high heels”.
There is a bit of coquetry in this sentence, a nice international flair. And of course, coquetry was an essential part of the job description. The aristocratic name also obliges, it signals the necessary elegant distance. The head hostess is, so to speak, the “mother” of the cruise ship (the father would then, much less obviously, be the captain). A very charming, elegant, casual motherliness, Beatrice’s job – mostly addressed by the passengers by her first name – was to keep a traveling community together on board, to take care of that large family to which the passengers belong in a more or less natural way be on a cruise.
She was discovered by the “Traumschiff” producer in the Berlin comedy
Heide Keller was born in Düsseldorf in 1939, she attended drama school and played theater for many years in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich. Shakespeare’s Julia was among these roles, but otherwise mostly boulevard. In the Comedy Berlin, Wolfgang Rademann, the producer of the series, then did it for the Dream ship discovered. She then mainly worked for television (in contrast to the cinema actor Hans von Borsody, with whom she was married for ten years). She has made various TV appearances, in between Derrick and crime scene and Klimbim, later Rosamunde Pilcher or Inga Lindström. One of her first television roles was on the Millowitsch stage in the play “Der Meisterboxer”, as a dancer Coletta Corolani.
As head hostess, Heide Keller always knew how to deal with her professionalism, when emotions were necessary and how far she could go with them. It was a role that you keep developing, with every episode that goes into the experience over the years – Heide Keller finally wrote some of the scripts himself, under the name Jac Dueppen. And it was a role in which you knew when to step down the gangway for the last time, in high heels. Heide Keller died on Friday at the age of 81.