Born: December 6, 1892 in Wiesbaden
died: September 22, 1978 in Munich

The daughter of a sawmill owner of Frisian origin and a Hessian mother, she attended secondary school for girls and took acting lessons with Hans Oberländer at the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden. The nineteen-year-old received her first engagement at the Hoftheater in Karlsruhe. In 1915, she moved to the Schauspielhaus in Leipzig, where her actual stage career began and where she spent almost two decades of her professional life, with interruptions in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin, among other places.

Her favorite roles were resolute, shrewd women, be it Marthe Rull in Kleist's "Der zerbrochene Krug", Mrs. Henschel in Gerhart Hauptmann's "Fuhrmann Henschel", or the title character of Brecht's "Mother Courage".

After the end of the Second World War, during which she lost her only son, she continued her stage career in Koblenz, Stuttgart and Munich, where she was a member of the ensemble of the Bayerisches Staatsschauspiel from 1948-1958.

Parallel to her theater work, she also appeared in films from 1922 onwards and over the course of her career she appeared in over a hundred productions, mostly in supporting roles, for example with Zarah Leander in "Zu neuen Ufern" (1937) or "Heimat" (1938), with Emil Jannings in "Der zerbrochene Krug" (1937) or with Heinrich George in "Hochzeit auf Bärenhof".

As housekeepers (for example in the "Father Brown" comedies with Heinz Rühmann), as prudent mothers or landladies who like to interfere, she later became a reliable force in German cinema and television. She experienced her greatest success in 1974 as "Lina Braake". In the film of the same name by Bernhard Sinkel, she played a sprightly old woman alongside Fritz Rasp who, at the end of her life, takes revenge on her bank with intelligence and charm in order to donate the money she has swindled to a good cause.