For almost half a century she belonged to the ensemble of the Vienna Burgtheater and for much longer to those actresses who were remembered after seeing them.

Gertraud Jesserer knew early on how to attach great importance to smaller roles.

When Otto Schenk got Fritz Kortner, the "greatest Shylock of our theater era", as Hilde Spiel wrote in the FAZ at the time, to embody the Merchant of Venice in a television film in 1968, Gertraud Jesserer was Jessica, Shylock's daughter.

Just as she was Josef Meinrad's daughter on her debut in the film “Die Halbzarte” at Romy Schneider's side in 1959.

Five years later she was on stage with Meinrad in one of her many Nestroy productions: as apprentice Christopherl in “He wants to make a joke”.

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the features section.

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Nestroy, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Horváth - the great authors of Austrian theater were naturally part of their wide-ranging repertoire. Marianne Hoppe played the professor widow Hedwig Schuster in the legendary performance of Thomas Bernhard's “Heldenplatz”, which shook Vienna much more strongly at the premiere in 1988 than the recent departure of a Chancellor who was not entirely talented in acting. But when the play was performed again in Austria for the first time after Bernhard's death in 2010, the role of the patriarch, who still heard the cheering of the masses at the announcement of Austria's “Anschluss” to the “Third Reich”, fell as naturally as Gertraud Jesserer to. By then she had already become a living legend.

Kainz Medal 1974, chamber actress since 1986, Johann Nestroy Ring 1998, Gold Medal of Honor 2003 - there was no shortage of honors. This became particularly evident in 2006 at the latest, when the Burgtheater revived an old tradition after decades and had twelve actors portrayed for the walkways of the house. In addition to Kirsten Dene and Andrea Clausen, Gert Voss, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Martin Schwab and others, Gertraud Jesserer was of course also part of it.

She could be funny, rough, delicate, devious, merciless, and calculating. Many of her female characters, no matter how different they were, had one thing in common: you didn't always have to like them, but you never tended to underestimate them. Abysses were definitely to be expected. In Luc Bondy's celebrated Viennese production of “Tartuffe” in 2013 she played Madame Pernelle, the bigoted mother of Orgone: an “ice-cold moral monster”, as it was called in the FAZ at the time.

Gertraud Jesserer was successful.

Early in the cinema, for example in “The Legacy of Björndal”, for decades on stage, where she made her debut in 1960 with “Liliom” at the Theater in der Josefstadt, often on television, where she appeared in “Monaco Franze”, “Derrick”, “ Traumschiff "or" Kommissar Rex "could be seen.

In private life, Gertraud Jesserer was repeatedly plagued by strokes of fate: Her first husband, the actor Peter Vogel, committed suicide in 1978, her son Nikolas died in 1991 while working as a war correspondent.

Now Gertraud Jesserer has tragically died in a fire in her Vienna apartment.

She was 77 years old.