Marthe Keller turns 80: Go so you don't have to say no to drugs

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Marthe Keller turns 80: Go so you don't have to say no to drugs Article by Jürgen Kaube • 2 hours • 3 minutes reading time The circumstances under which she became famous were strange. The contract for the film "Marathon Man" was handed to her, but there was no audition. Before filming, she rehearsed for four weeks in New York. Marthe Keller lacked English skills, but this went unnoticed because the Basel-born actress played a German in the film, and Dustin Hoffman was an "avalanche des mots", an avalanche of words. So she hardly had a chance to say anything anyway. The production neglected Keller, who was offended and wanted to quit, whereupon she was showered with kindness and stayed. In Los Angeles, she met the world stars of cinema, but was asked to please leave before the end of a party. Why? John Schlesinger, the director, explains the gesture of respect to her: "So that you don't have to say no to drugs." In her witty, touching and still untranslated memoirs, "Les Scénes de ma vie", Marthe Keller describes how difficult it was for her, the trained dancer, to find her way into acting. A skiing accident ended her planned ballet career, and she performed in theaters in Heidelberg and Berlin. Before that, she studied philosophy with Adorno in Frankfurt. Then things went pretty quickly. In 1969, she played a funny girl with Yves Montand and Maria Schell in the comedy "Le diable par la queue" (Grab the devil by the tail, in German the devil strangely became a tiger). Films followed with Annie Girardot, Philippe Noiret and Maurice Ronet. "Marathon Man" from 1976 opened Hollywood to her. She was not cast in John Frankenheimer's "Black Sunday" the following year either, but was only asked whether she could imagine playing in the film about a Palestinian attempt to attack the Super Bowl at the Miami Dolphins' stadium. Not having to audition remains a constant in her film life, which can be explained by the fact that her appearance made sense at first glance: a comparatively deep voice, slim malice, silhouette in trousers - "You look the same from the front and back," her caustic mother remarked about the nude scene in "Marathon Man", "sulfureuse", as Keller puts it, sulphurous. As an ageless diva in Billy Wilder's "Fedora" Consequently, in 1978, in Billy Wilder's "Fedora", she was a withdrawn, ageless diva who had features of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Corinne Griffith. A year earlier, in one of her saddest films, “Bobby Deerfield,” she had played a woman hungry for life who, as Dominik Graf put it in this newspaper, “turns her love for a melancholic racing driver on and off just as abruptly.” Keller lived with Deerfield’s actor, Al Pacino, for seven years. Many films followed, as well as many appearances in television series and in the theater. The supporting roles increased; many mothers, friends, psychologists, former fiancées. She played them all nobly, without pushing herself forward, as if she was quite happy not to have to play leading roles any more. From 1983 to 1986, she played the paramour in the Salzburg “Jedermann” alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer, with whom she then also made “Georg Elser – Einer aus Deutschland” about the unsuccessful 1939 assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. She later directed operas, such as "Don Giovanni" at the Met, the "Dialogues of the Carmelites" in Strasbourg, and "Lucia di Lammermoor" in Washington. Two brilliant recent films, "Schwesterlein" as a wicked mother by Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger and "Wanda, my miracle" with the truly wonderful Agnieszka Grochowska, unfortunately fell during the time of the corona-related cinema closures. Last year, a film with Marthe Keller was released in cinemas, "One Life" about the English organizer of the "children's trains" from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, Nicholas Winton. In a short scene, she plays the wife of the Czech-British publisher Robert Maxwell. So she hasn't let go even after sixty years of film acting. Today, the clever and beautiful Marthe Keller turns eighty.