The actress and director Margit Saad is dead. She died in Munich on Monday at the age of 94, as her son, the conductor Pierre-Dominique Ponnelle, told the German Press Agency. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” had previously reported.
Born in Munich, she became known to a wide audience through roles in numerous cinema and television films. You could see her in movies like “Peter Voss, the Thief of Millions” or “Oops, Eddie is coming”. She played the main role in the English crime thriller “The Trail Leads to Nothing” (1960) by Joseph Losey – “one of my most beautiful films”, Margit Saad said on her 70th birthday in 1999 in a dpa interview.
She had a great stage success in the title role of the musical “Irma la Douce”. She played alongside Harald Juhnke in the German premiere in Baden-Baden in 1961. Margit Saad had her first engagement after training as an actor at the renowned Otto Falckenberg School in Munich in 1952 in Düsseldorf, where she performed for a good two years as an actress and chansonnette at the “Kom(m)ödchen”.
In 1971 she began another artistic career and made a name for herself as a director of sophisticated documentaries and literary adaptations.
Her TV film “The Story of the Good Old Man and the Beautiful Girl” based on the novella by Italo Svevo received good reviews. In 1988 she shot the television version of John van Druten’s stage comedy “Song of the Dove”. Margit Saad has also successfully tried her hand as a theater director. “Unfortunately, today’s television is only about the ratings and no longer about demanding films,” Margit Saad criticized back in 1999. This has meant that many of her proposed projects have been rejected in recent years. “I don’t make friends with such statements, but unfortunately that’s how it is.”
Saad was married to French director and set designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988).
