Actress Elisabeth Trissenaar dies After elections in Taiwan: Nauru breaks off relationships

The actress Elisabeth Trissenaar, who was also known for her work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has died.

The Austrian died on Sunday evening at the age of 79 in Berlin’s Charité hospital, lawyer Peter Raue announced on Monday on behalf of the family of her husband Hans Neuenfels (1941-2022).

Trissenaar, daughter of a singing student and a Dutch doctor, was born in Vienna on April 13, 1944. During her acting training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, she met her future husband, director Neuenfels. In 1966 their son Benedict was born, who is successful as a cameraman (“The Counterfeiters”).

Trassenaar and Neuenfels brought the first theater works to Krefeld. She played in Bochum and with Peter Palitzsch at the Staatstheater Stuttgart. Trassenaar worked at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Vienna Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zürich and the Schauspiel Köln. In Berlin she worked with Neuenfels at the Volksbühne from 1985 to 1990 and from 2001 she played at the Deutsches Theater.

During the Salzburg Festival, Trassenaar appeared several times in “Everyman”. She played great female characters such as Ibsen’s “Nora” and “Hedda Gabler”, Kleist’s “Penthesilea” and Euripides’ “Elektra”, Gretchen in Goethe’s “Faust”, Varya in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”, Lessing’s “Emilia Galotti” and Strindberg’s Fraulein Julie.

In Fassbinder’s 1976 “Bolwieser”, Trissenaar played the unfaithful wife of a station master. She also appeared in his works “In a Year with 13 Moons” (1978), “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979) and as Lina in the film adaptation of Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980). She did not play smooth roles, but women with rough edges and neuroses.

She filmed with Doris Dörrie (“Nobody Loves Me”), Robert van Ackeren (“The Other Smile”), Agnieszka Holland (“Bitter Harvest”) and Rainer Kaufmann (“Cold is the Evening Breath”). She appeared on camera for Michael Herbig in ‘The Story of Brandner Kaspar’ and filmed ‘I’ve Never Been So Happy’ together with Devid Striesow and Nadja Uhl.

The Austrian playwright and Nobel Prize winner for literature Elfriede Jelinek created the play “Jackie and Other Princesses” for Trassenaar, in which she played the role of Kennedy’s widow Jackie O. at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. As with dozens of other joint productions, the direction was in the hands of husband Neuenfels. (sda/dpa)