Biography:

Karla Runkehl (Luise Faber) was born in Stettin, Germany (now: Szczecin, Poland) on November 7, 1930. In 1945, she settled in Greifswald and two years later at the age of 17, she moved to Berlin and started an acting class at the DEFA Studio for Young Talents. After graduating in 1951, she joined the Deutsches Theater ensemble.

Starting in the 1950s, Karla Runkehl also performed in film for cinema and television. Critics noted her portrayals of lively young girls, who, in due course, matured into worldly and emancipated women. Runkehl became one of East Germany's most popular actresses and was eventually held up as a socialist role model. East German film journalists called her a star of young DEFA.

One of Runkehl’s first leading film roles was in Kurt Maetzig’s two-part historic film about the German working class leader Ernst Thälmann. She performed the character of Änne Harms, a young Hamburg working-class girl (part 1), who grows into a strong and beautiful motherly woman (part 2). Runkehl is also remembered as Annegret, an idealistic peasant girl and the illegitimate daughter of the former lord of the manor, who goes to study to become an agronomist in Maetzig’s 1956 epic Schlösser und Katen.

In the 60s, Runkehl played in two films that were impacted by censorship: She performed as Luise Faber, an emancipated and self-confident university lecturer and wife of a success-driven manager, in Günter Stahnke’s 1965 banned production Der Frühling braucht Zeit; and she was part of the cast of Heiner Carow’s Die Russen kommen, a psychological study of a teenager in the last days of WWII. Officials banned both films because of their modernistic style.

Runkehl played in various literary adaptions (Die Frau am Pranger, Unterm Birnbaum), youth films (Die aus der 12b) and contemporary dramas (Sabine Wulff).

Karla Runkehl died on December 24, 1986 in Kleinmachnow, Germany.