Lilo Pempeit
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Lilo Pempeit | |
|---|---|
| Born | Liselotte Irmgard Pempeit 6 October 1922 |
| Died | 7 May 1993 (aged 70) |
| Other names | Liselotte Eder |
| Occupations | Actress, translator |
| Years active | 1966–1982 |
| Notable work | Angst essen Seele auf, Die Ehe der Maria Braun, Berlin Alexanderplatz |
| Spouse(s) | Helmut Fassbinder (m. 1945; div. 1951) Wolff Eder (m. 1959) |
| Children | Rainer Werner Fassbinder |
Lilo Pempeit (born Liselotte Irmgard Pempeit; 6 October 1922 – 7 May 1993) was a German film and stage actress and literary translator. She is best known for her recurring appearances in the films of her son, New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and for her early German translations of Truman Capote’s prose.[1][2]
Pempeit was born in the Free City of Danzig (today Gdańsk, Poland) on 6 October 1922.[2] During the final years of the Second World War she studied history and German philology at LMU Munich, later describing herself as “a refugee on the run who hid in libraries.”[3]
In Munich she met medical officer Helmut Fassbinder, whom she married in 1945; their only child, Rainer Werner, was born the same year in Bad Wörishofen.[3]
Career
After her 1951 divorce, Pempeit supported herself as a freelance translator of English and French fiction, beginning with Capote’s story collection Baum der Nacht for Limes Verlag in 1957, work that established her reputation in German publishing.[1] By the late 1960s, she also held a bookkeeping post at Munich’s Society for Radiation Research (today part of Helmholtz Zentrum München) while assisting her son’s cooperatively run Antiteater troupe.[1]
Pempeit’s screen debut came in Fassbinder’s short Das kleine Chaos (1966), and between 1969 and 1982 she acted in twenty of his films and television productions, usually cast as waitresses, neighbours or mothers whose understated presence grounded his melodramas in everyday realism.[2] Her spare, undemonstrative style drew critical notice in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1969) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and she later appeared in international festival successes such as The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and Veronika Voss (1982).[2]
Following Fassbinder’s death in 1982 Pempeit ended her acting career, remarking that “the roles had always belonged to him.”[1]
