Hannelore Elsner

In town for a celebration of her career in conjunction with the German consulate , the two time German Film Award winner—their Oscar—and the star of more than 100 films and TV specials in her more than four decade career has been running non-stop since arriving stateside three days before. So in this rare moment of downtime, she sips the wine with a huge ear to ear smile and prepares to, once again, talk about playing a type of character that gets tongues wagging stateside but in her native Germany is no big deal.  

Hannelore Elsner is playing a lesbian… a woman who spends years involved with a married woman, only to have the relationship abruptly end when the woman hastily chooses family over love.  

It’s a role that would snag headlines for Streep—or any other actress, really—were she to take it on in an American film. Though this type of work wins awards, it’s still fodder for the press. ‘What a risk it must be to play gay on film’, the line of questioning typically begins.  

“How old fashioned,” Elsner laughs before taking another sip—the actress, who’s in her early 60’s, looks at least 15 years younger. “It’s normal—totally normal. It doesn’t matter for me. Nobody thinks, ‘Are you a lesbian.’ Nobody asks me about that.”  

For Elsner, the fact that the character of Gerlinde is a lesbian is completely secondary to her real reason for being attracted to the project—the idea that a will to live trumps loneliness.  

In Vivere, Gerlinde finds herself on the verge of suicide when her long time lover up and leaves her. Ready to give up, Gerlinde is spared from death and finds herself with the chance to begin again.  

Cue phone call. That’s Inga, the girlfriend, on the other line, calling to see if they can work things out. Gerlinde, who’s spent years waiting for this woman to leave her family, hangs up… in part, Elsner says, because she’s discovered the will to begin her life again.  

That sudden strength comes from a chance meeting with a young girl named Francesca.  

“She saw the desperation from Francesca, who is about to lose her life because she is the mother for her younger sister, she is the wife, she played her own mother in this family,” she says. “She’s like a stone, she cannot feel anymore. So she sees that she needs to throw away the old things. She says, ‘Now I have to leave this love because I have to save my life.’”

Elsner said she was drawn to the script because it celebrates life. And while journalists and critics—myself included, admittedly—press her to talk about any trepidation she might have had playing gay on film, she says the more interesting topic for discussion is how a woman, in 2008, could possibly be stuck living a lie.  

“What for me is really interesting is that the friend, Inga, she’s not only a lesbian, she has a family,” she says. “So that she maybe lived a wrong life. This is very sad to me.”  

Costar Esther Zimmering was attracted to the film for many of the same reasons as Elsner. In fact, she dropped out of a bigger budget project to work on writer/director Angelina Maccarone’s little indie. As Francesca, she got drawn to the idea that her character could mistake the mother/daughter bond that develops with Gerlinde as something sexual.  

As an actress, the choice was simple.  

Like many a young actress in Germany, Zimmering grew up watching Elsner in film. To make a film with her was a dream come true—to star opposite her was unreal, the actress says.  

“You can’t not (admire her),” Zimmering says. “Every girl looks up to her.”  

And the reasons are evident. A devoted spokesperson of the German AIDS Council, which Elsner joined more than a decade ago because, “I had to”, she’s traveled throughout Africa and Europe lending her name to the growing health epidemic. And while she makes bigger budget fare—the type of films that make people “recognize me on the street”, Elsner laughs—at the end of the day, she’s drawn to smaller pictures and the theatre… movies that require her to use every inch of her craft.  

That and she’s the type of lady who can unapologetically knock back a glass of wine between interviews and not bat an eyelash when talks turn to going gay on film.  

Germany’s Meryl Streep, no doubt.