Cordula Trantow

Cordula Trantow was born in Berlin on 29 December 1942. Her father, Herbert Trantow, was a composer and conductor, and her mother, Edith Trantow, born Kirchhoff, was a dance teacher. She completed her Abitur and studied acting in Berlin with Marlise Ludwig, while also training in classical ballet with the choreographer Tatjana Gsovsky.

Trantow had her first screen success as a noble princess in Aufruhr im Schlaraffenland, a film based on Hans Sachs. Her breakthrough came in 1959, when at 16 she played Franziska in Bernhard Wicki's Die Brücke, opposite the young Volker Lechtenbrink. The role won her the Filmband in Gold, the German film award for best young actress. She later called the film a gift that had opened every door for her.

In 1960 André Cayatte cast her as Helga opposite Charles Aznavour in Le passage du Rhin, and the same year she played Binja in the regional drama An heiligen Wassern. In 1962 she played Geli Raubal, the niece of Adolf Hitler, in Stuart Heisler's Hollywood film Hitler, and was nominated for the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer. She soon turned away from Hollywood, saying in a later interview that it had meant nothing to her.

After many German films she concentrated on the theatre, appearing at the state theatres in Munich and Stuttgart and at the Ruhrfestspiele, and in some of the most important productions of the 1970s and 1980s. Her husband Rudolf Noelte cast her as Frida in his film of Kafka's Das Schloß (1968), and she was widely known for the lead role in the three-part television thriller Babeck (1968). She also worked in radio drama, playing the title role in Fontane's Effi Briest in 1974, and as a dubbing artist for Claude Jade, Dominique Sanda, Ali MacGraw, Marie Versini and Sandrine Bonnaire.

From 1991 she was artistic director of the Weilheimer Theatersommer. In 1998 she left Weilheim for Garmisch-Partenkirchen after a campaign against her production of Faust I over a supposedly obscene Walpurgis Night scene. She went on staging Faust there and in Ludwigshafen, directed Momo with Cosma Shiva Hagen, and in 2004 toured Romeo and Juliet with Hagen and Marco Hofschneider. On television she appeared in Bella Block (2004), the series Bis in die Spitzen (2005), Ein Fall für zwei, Hubert und Staller and Morden im Norden.

Trantow married the theatre and film director Rudolf Noelte in 1963, and he directed her in several stage, film and radio productions. She was Protestant. In the 1980s she lived in Allmannshausen in Upper Bavaria, and she spent much of her life in Bavaria. She once said that she still met people, especially men, who told her she had been the crush of their youth, among them the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Cordula Trantow died on 12 August 2026, aged 83, after a short and serious illness. According to her agency she died surrounded by her family. The place of death was not given in the announcement. Her Berlin agency, Agentur Nicolai, made her death public on 1 September 2026, several weeks later, in a statement carried by the dpa news agency and reported by Die Zeit, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, n-tv and RTL. The agency recalled her great commitment to classical theatre and her unmistakable fondness for comedy.

Trantow is remembered above all for Die Brücke, still regarded as one of the most important films of postwar German cinema, and for a Golden Globe nomination that made her one of the few young German actresses of her generation noticed in Hollywood. Her choice to leave film stardom for the classical stage, and her later years running summer theatre in Bavaria, made her a lasting figure in German theatre. She received the Bambi in 1963 and the Federal Cross of Merit in 2000.