Marianne Hoppe

Marianne Hoppe grew up on her family’s estate in Mecklenburg and went to school in Berlin and Weimar. At 17 she joined Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Her role in the film “Der Schimmelreiter” (1934) made her a star almost overnight.

In 1935 Gustaf Gründgens, director of the Prussian State Theatre, engaged her, and in 1936 the two married. It was widely known in theatre circles that Gründgens loved men, and the marriage was long regarded as a cover. Letters from Hoppe’s estate, however, show genuine affection; both were bisexual. Hoppe later called her career in the Nazi era, when she was a favourite of the regime’s elite and was invited to dinner by Hitler, “the black page in my golden book”. The couple divorced in 1946 but remained close until Gründgens’ death.

After the war Hoppe lived for a time with the actress Therese Giehse, and in the 1970s with Anni Mewes. She hardly ever spoke publicly about these relationships.

On stage she reinvented herself: she played Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and later worked with directors such as Claus Peymann, Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller and with the writer Thomas Bernhard. She was known for “taking apart every sentence”. Her last stage appearance was in 1997 at the Berliner Ensemble. She died in 2002 in Upper Bavaria, aged 93. “German theatre has lost its queen,” said Peymann.