Biography:

Dorothea Meissner was born in Brandenburg, Germany on July 18, 1949. After studying acting in both Rostock and Berlin, she began performing at a variety of theaters, including the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In 1972, she joined the Volkstheater Rostock, where she would perform for almost forty years until her early death in 2010. One of her last theater roles was in Steffen Mensching’s musical Das Ballhaus (The Ballroom), which was inspired by Ettore Scola’s Oscar-nominated film Le Bal.

Meissner made her film debut in Heiner Carow’s Die Russen kommen in 1968. She played the female lead Christine, the girlfriend of a boy who believes in the final victory of the Nazis. Although the film was banned by East German authorities until 1987, parts of it were used as flashbacks in the film Karriere. Meissner worked on one more film, Der Dritte, at the DEFA Studios. In years following her DEFA work, she performed in television productions rather than in cinema, including Keine Hochzeit ohne Ernst, based on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, in which she played Cecily Cardew alongside actor Ezard Haussmann (Algernon Moncrieff). Meissner was the lead in the seven-part TV series Das Mädchen Krümel, set in 1920s Germany. She was cast in the title role as Martha Dehnert, nicknamed Krümel, the daughter of a worker’s family, who faced unemployment and the harsh consequences of economic inflation.

Meissner was also known for her dubbing projects and radio programs. One of her most intriguing dubbings was for the actress Libuse Safranková as the princess in the successful East German-Czechoslovakian fairytale coproduction, Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (1973, dir. Vaclav Vorlicek).

Dorothea Meissner died in Rostock on March 5, 2010.