Bibiana Zeller was surrounded by something girlish into old age. She had a mischievous look on her face and a light, fragile voice that became her trademark. Especially in comic roles she was able to create the most beautiful bizarreness. And she had many comic roles, most famously: Ilse Kottan, the wife of police major Adolf Kottan, in the satirical crime series “Kottan Investigated”, which often exceeded the limits of madness. It ran on Austrian television from 1976 to 1984 and caused great outrage before it became a cult. Zeller’s witty Ilse once commented that the title character was played by three different actors in 19 episodes, most recently by Lukas Resetarits: “You look somehow different today.” She had a great joke in this role, with which she gained great popularity.
But actually she was a theater actress, from the heart and with devotion, even more: Burgtheater actress, as such she was awarded the title of chamber actress. Born on February 25, 1928 in Mauer near Vienna, Zeller attended a private drama school in Vienna after the war. The reason for her career choice was the “escape from everyday life”, according to her autobiography “Please let me play!”, published in 2015. In 1951 she was allowed to play at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt. In the following twenty years she worked mainly as a freelance actress, mostly on German stages, and she also did a lot of filming.
In 1972 she came to the Burgtheater in Vienna, where she was a permanent member until her retirement in 1999. Here she played dozens of small roles, a reliable and remarkable “supporting actress” popular with the audience, as it is always a little disparagingly called. With her often wonderfully eccentric Zeller charm, she enriched dramas by Shakespeare, Kleist, Ibsen, Pirandello and Brecht as well as Austrian classics by Nestroy and Grillparzer. Zeller always had a special fondness for modern drama. In Claus Peymann’s legendary Thomas Bernhard premieres, for example, she played the silent landlady in “Theatermacher” and Frau Liebig in “Heldenplatz”. Even at an advanced age she was available for all kinds of premieres and for every absurdity, worked with Thomas Langhoff, Luc Bondy, Nicolas Stemann, Martin Kušej, played in Friederike Heller’s Handke productions “Untertagblues” and “Spur der Verirren”. . In 2012 she performed in the Burgtheater-Kasino: in “After the Opera. Würgeengel 2”, staged by Martin Wuttke based on Luis Buñuel.
In 2010 she received the Austrian film award Romy as “most popular actress”. She was particularly popular as Herta in the TV series “Julia – Eine Unusual Frau” with Christiane Hörbiger in the title role (1998-2002). At the Salzburg Festival in 2005 and 2006, Zeller was everyone’s worried mother alongside the recently deceased Peter Simonischek, here too with her own old-lady esprit. She also played a sprightly old woman in the ARD audience hit “Die Spätlitzer” from 2009, in which Jan Josef Liefers wants to lead a fun-loving senior group to success as a band. In the 2013 sequel, the rockin’ seniors set out to take over the nursing home. Zeller had her last role in the cinema in 2016 in Chris Kraus’s “The Flowers of Yesterday”.
As her son Fabian Eder confirmed on Monday, Bibiana Zeller died on Sunday at the age of 95. Her magic continues to work.