The film and television world mourns Nadja Tiller: At the age of 93, the actress died on Tuesday night in Hamburg, as a family friend confirmed to the German Press Agency, citing relatives.
The “Bild” newspaper reported first. “My mother died last night in the “Augustinum” in Hamburg. She fell asleep peacefully in the presence of a nurse,” said Tiller’s daughter accordingly. The nurse called her early in the morning and informed her of her mother’s death. At a later date there will be a burial at sea, “that was our mother’s wish, just as my father wanted it, it can take a few months,” said the daughter accordingly.
Her breakthrough as a noble prostitute Rosemarie
One of Tiller’s best-known films was “The Girl Rosemarie”, in which she appeared on the screen in 1958 as the noble prostitute Rosemarie Nitribitt. At the time, Rolf Thiele’s satire on the period of the economic miracle was considered a scandalous film and attracted crowds of viewers to the cinemas. It screened at the Venice Film Festival and won a Golden Globe in the United States. The role brought Tiller’s international breakthrough: she shot with colleagues such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Gabin, Yul Brunner, Rod Steiger and Curd Jürgens. After numerous feature films, including with her husband Walter Giller, she increasingly worked for television and theater from the 1960s.
Hamburg’s culture senator Carsten Brosda (SPD) described Tiller as the “grande dame of film”. “We mourn the loss of a great actress and our thoughts are with her loved ones,” he wrote on Twitter.
She was married to Walter Giller for 55 years
Born in Vienna, she and her husband lived in Lugano until 2008. After around 50 years, they sold their house there and moved up north together in 2008 – to Hamburg, where Giller grew up. The couple lived next door to each other in a luxurious retirement home on the banks of the Elbe in Hamburg. Giller (“Rosen für den Prosecutor”) died in 2011. The couple had their last joint film appearance on screen in Leander Haussmann’s “Dinosaur” (2009). Four years earlier, Tiller appeared in Til Schweiger’s film “Barfuss”.
Since her first theatrical engagement in 1949 at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt, the former “Miss Austria” (1949) has worked as an actress and has appeared on stage in addition to film and television. In the end there should be more than 120 films and series. She played her last role at the age of 87 in “My Fair Lady” at the Theater in Braunschweig.
Tiller and Giller were married for 55 years until his death. They met each other while shooting “Schlagerparade” (1953). The two, who married in 1956, were not only a dream couple privately – they appeared together in around 30 films. Tiller especially liked “Schloss Gripsholm” (1963). Giller and Tiller – the two actors had to protest again and again that they didn’t have stage names.
He, the comedian and character actor, and she, the femme fatale. Even as an older couple, they were in demand as a double pack: in the TV film “Love like on the first day” (2005) as lovers around 70, in the Henning Mankell radio play “Begegnung in the afternoon” (2008) as an old, separated couple .
The couple, who had two adult children, even received awards together: the Federal Cross of Merit on the ribbon of the Order of Merit, in 2006 the Bambi for life’s work. The couple appeared on stage around 600 times in Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite”. “I always basked a bit in Nadja’s shadow, who was in the front row,” Giller once said in an interview. For him, the secret of their long love lay in “familiarity”, as he once explained – “a cross between trust and deep friendship”.
