Viennese artist
Actress Erika Pluhar turns 85
Actress Erika Pluhar in January 2024 in Cologne. photo
© Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa
She was a star on the stage and in film. Instead of retiring, Pluhar built further careers as a singer and author. Art helped her not to be broken by reality.
Erika Pluhar never retired. The Austrian actress, singer and author performs at readings and chanson evenings, while also constantly writing new material. On February 28th, the Viennese artist with the distinctive smoky voice celebrates her 85th birthday. “Age is an impertinence,” Pluhar clarifies in an interview with the German Press Agency, and immediately adds: “But the word “courage” is in there.”
Pluhar is currently reading again and again from her latest book, “Gitti,” in which she recounts the childhood and youth of her sister, who now suffers from dementia. Given the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, people are more receptive to a book set during and after World War II, she says. Born in 1939, Pluhar has never forgotten her own memories of that war. “I can’t hear a siren yet. That still cuts deep into my heart,” she says in her house on the hilly outskirts of the city Vienna. Whenever there is war news on television, Pluhar always quickly changes the channel “because it depresses me so much.”
“Reality really took its toll on me”
The former Burgtheater actress connects her lifelong passion for inventing roles, song lyrics and history with her first stirring cinema experience towards the end of the World War. Her mother then had to explain to her that the dog in the film “Krambambuli” doesn’t really die, but that everything was just made up. “It kind of took root in me,” Pluhar says. “I went professionally to a place where you can counteract reality with your own imagination.” The artist adds: “And that has often helped me to survive reality.”
In the 1960s, Pluhar had a conflict-ridden marriage with the entrepreneur and socialite Udo Proksch, who years later was convicted of six counts of murder after a fatal insurance fraud. After a second marriage to the artist André Heller, she had a relationship with the actor Peter Vogel, who committed suicide in 1978. Pluhar’s daughter Anna died in 1999 as a result of an asthma attack. Anna’s then 15-year-old son Ignaz then raised Pluhar. “Reality really took its toll on me,” says Pluhar.
Rejection of Hollywood and top politics
Professionally, there are few low points in the artist’s life. Today, Pluhar is best known as a singer and as the author of more than a dozen books, including novels, poems and memoirs. Pluhar began her career on the theater stage. As an acting student, she was hired at the renowned Burgtheater in Vienna, where she was a member of the ensemble until 1999. She celebrated her breakthrough as a film actress in 1968 with a leading role in the two-part television series “Bel Ami”. She played for Wim Wenders in the Handke film adaptation “The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick”. His own directing works such as “Marafona” followed later. Their films can be seen at a retrospective organized by the Filmarchiv Austria for Pluhar’s birthday. She never followed the call from Hollywood. “I had requests, but they were bad films,” she says.
When she was younger, Pluhar also turned down Social Democratic inquiries about a possible candidacy for Federal President and a post as Minister of Culture. Politically, she always publicly positioned herself as an anti-fascist. After Anna’s death, she says, she received malicious anonymous letters. “Fascism has it very easy when there is fear,” she says, referring to war, migration and rising prices.