Hanna Schygulla

Born on Christmas Day 1943, in Königshütte, a Polish city that had been invaded by the Nazis since 1939, Hanna Schygulla is the daughter of German parents, Antonie and Joseph Schygulla, a lumber merchant who fought as an infantryman for Adolf Hitler during the conflict. , and was captured by the Americans in Italy. When she still had not managed to return home, little Hanna and her mother were expelled from the town where they lived by the communist regime that took power in Poland.

He first saw his father at the age of five, when he returned from captivity. “He went through life as a foreigner to himself,” he recalls. “I always remember him very disturbed by what he had seen, by how little life is worth in a war. In a way, he refused to go on living. I felt that negative vital vibration and had a certain reservation with him, I didn’t want to get close. It took him about 30 years to have a normal relationship with me; after that time and, until the end of his life, we had a relationship full of love, they were 10 very beautiful years, because we had a lot of life to recover. Yes, the consequences of History, with a capital letter, slip into the dining room and bedroom of each house”.

The family ended up in Munich, where a few years later the girl began to study acting at her mother’s initiative. “Years later she would confess to me that she had always wanted to be an actress.” She was 20 years old when she entered a school, in which she meets RW Fassbinder .. “She was the most important character on my path to becoming an actress,” she recalls. “I had left the center after a few weeks, thinking that this was not for me. And shortly after, he sought me out. He had also left, but he had a very strong premonition: that young woman who was in her class was going to be the protagonist of her films, and she wrote it that way much later, although she never told me about it. Fassbinder was in drama because he had not been admitted to film school and, although his acting skills were very good, his unquestionable vocation was film”.

Curiously, he treated her with great affection and tenderness, despite the fact that he terrified and manipulated the other actors whom he included in his ‘underground’ acting groups, or slept with some of them, giving free rein to his bisexuality. He included her in the cast of various works. “At that time, Fassbinder was doing theater because he didn’t have money to make movies, but his productions looked like movies. Then he made movies… that looked like theater!”.

He casts her in the leading female role in his debut feature, Love Is Colder Than Death , where she plays a prostitute, paired with a small-time pimp (Fassbinder himself), who begins to have dealings with the mob. She was also the absolute protagonist of the second, the avant-garde Katzelmacher , where she plays a young woman who gets involved with a group of cronies of a Greek immigrant.

After having her at his command again in God of the Plague , the telefilm Das Kaffeehaus, Warum läuft Herr R. Amok, The Trip to Niklashauser , Rio das mortes , Pioniere in Ingolstadt, Whity , Attention to that beloved prostitute and The merchant of In the four seasons , RW Fassbinder gets a little light in his head after attending a retrospective of Douglas Sirk films . He is completely dazzled by the American’s ability to connect with the public, so he catches a plane and goes to look for him at his residence in Lugano (Switzerland), where he gets him to receive him and have various talks with him.

He decides to continue with his intellectual cinema, with a coldness totally opposite to that of Sirk’s melodramas, but looking for subjects as popular as his own. “I had to create movies like Hollywood but without their hypocrisy.” Her first work in this vein was The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant , where Hanna Schygulla plays a model who begins a torrid relationship with an arrogant fashion designer. The film was a huge success around the world, making the actress one of the most desired by European filmmakers, and is considered the founding piece of the so-called New German Cinema, a new golden era for German filmmakers, four decades after After Expressionism.

The actress continued to inspire the director in Bremer Freiheit: Frau Geesche Gottfried – Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel, Wildwechsel , and the miniseries Acht Stunden sind kein Tag , but during the filming of Effi Briest , she had a dispute with him that began with disagreements over how to approach Effi Briest. his character, but that he continued due to the low salary that the actors received. In the end she came to mutiny all her companions against the director. Fassbinder ended up telling her some rather forceful sentences: “I can’t stand the sight of your face anymore. You bust my balls”, so he decided to stop calling her for 6 years.

However, the filmmaker had to forget about the dispute when he realized that she was the ideal actress to lead the cast of The Marriage of Maria Braun , where she played the woman alluded to in the title, who at the end of the war became a prostitute. getting pregnant by a German soldier when her husband reappears. She won the Silver Lion for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival.

They became one and flesh again, in titles such as The third generation , the Berlin Alexanderplatz series , and above all Lili Marleen , where she achieved one of her best works as Lale Andersen, the singer who recorded the musical theme alluded to in the title, all a hymn for Nazism and later for the allied side. The premature death of RW Fassbinder at the age of 37, in 1982, from mixing sleeping pills with cocaine, is considered in a certain way the end of the New German Cinema.

Hanna Schygula also worked for the other emblematic German directors of this trend, such as Wim Wenders ( False Movement ), Volker Schlöndorff ( Circle of Deceptions ) and Margarethe von Trotta ( Woman’s Madness ), so it can be said that she has only lacked Werner Herzog . She was also raffled off by authors from the rest of the world, such as the Italian Marco Ferreri ( Piera’s Story ), the Czech Vojtech Jasný ( Opinions of a Clown ), the French Jean-Luc Godard ( Passion ), the BritishKenneth Branagh ( To die still ) and even two Spaniards, Carlos Saura ( Antoinette ) and Fernando Trueba ( The girl with your eyes ).

From the 80s, he began to take his career more calmly. “I was at the top, but an inner voice that was always with me asked me to dedicate myself to taking care of my parents, who were already elderly by then,” she recalls. “For a while I distanced myself from the cinema.” In the 90’s she developed an intense activity as a singer, offering recitals all over the world. “When I was traveling as a refugee with my mother to Munich at the end of World War II, there were continuous blackouts on the train, and I would sing very loudly to scare away fear. People had fun, and the occasional passenger said ‘that girl is going to be a singer’. Afterwards I continued singing every time she was left alone ”.

For the past three decades, Hanna Schygulla has not played any more leading roles, although she has appeared in films by Agnès Varda ( One Hundred and One Nights ), Amos Gitai ( Promised Land ), and, most recently, Fatih Akin ( The Other Side ) . , Sergio Castellitto ( Fortunata ) and Aleksandr Sokurov ( Faust ). “I have faith that a very good character will come to me, and I will put into it everything that has made me a survivor of the many temptations I have not fallen into, because I have never stopped listening to my inner voice.”

In 2010 he received the honorary Golden Bear from the Berlin Film Festival. At the end of 2013, she celebrated her 70th birthday by publishing his memoir “Wake up and start dreaming”. She is discreet until death, there is no data on Hanna Schygulla’s partners or husbands, and she has not had children. “For love I went to live in Paris, but then it broke up because my parents needed me.”