RIP Hannelore Elsner

German actress Hannelore Elsner died in  her sleep on April 21, 2019. She was 76. While not well known outside continental Europe, Elsner was a major star in Germany, one of the country's most famous actresses and a regular in both film and television. She was also one of the last great originals, a larger-than-life personality who seemed fearless in her choice of roles and in her intense acting style. She quickly moved to film and TV roles, but spent the first two decades of her career playing roles in a series of largely forgettable light comedies and romantic dramas, often as the sexy scarlet alongside 1960s German heartthrobs such as Bubi Scholz and Peter Alexander. It was not until the 1970s and '80s that she began to earn a reputation as a character actress, thanks to roles from New German Cinema auteur Edgar Reitz (The Trip to Vienna, The Tailor from Ulm) and Hungarian master Istvan Szabo (1980's The Green Bird). Her role as police detective Lea Sommer in German series The Commissioner, which ran from 1994 to 2006, made Elsner a bona fide TV star and broke new ground for the portrayal of women in German television. Elsner appeared in only one Euro-western “Challenge to White Fang” (1974) as Jane Leclerc.