Irmelin Krause

Irmelin Krause was born on 6 April 1938 and grew up in Berlin. Her father was killed in the Second World War, and as the eldest of three children she shared the housework and looked after her younger siblings. Her mother, Erna Krause (1909 to 1991), sang in the chorus of the Berlin State Opera and nurtured her daughter's talent with piano lessons and membership of the Berlin Mozart Choir. At about ten she saw Hansel and Gretel at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and decided that her place was on the stage. Sources: Pankower Allgemeine Zeitung (2020), Wikipedia.

At her mother's insistence she first trained for a secure profession, completing a music degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin as a music teacher. She then trained as an actress at the acting studio of the Volkstheater Rostock. In the mid-1960s, while working in Frankfurt (Oder), she undertook a third course of study in Berlin, learning chanson from Fania Fénelon, which qualified her to perform in musical theatre.

Krause began acting in 1960. She played at the Gerhart Hauptmann Theatre in Görlitz from 1961 to 1963, making her mark as Gretchen in Goethe's Faust from Christmas 1962, then in Zittau (1963 to 1964), Anklam (1964 to 1965) and at the Kleist Theatre in Frankfurt (Oder). Her roles included Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Alkmene in Amphitryon, Elisabeth in Don Carlos and Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. After her chanson training she moved into revue and musicals, starting as Jenny in Brecht's Das kleine Mahagonny and including the two-hander I Do! I Do! (Das Himmelbett) with director Wolfgang-Claus Asch. From 1975, back in Berlin, she toured her own programmes of chansons, folk songs and literary songs after Goethe and Fontane. She celebrated 60 years on stage with a gala in Weißensee in February 2020.

On GDR television she was, as the Berliner Kurier put it, never a leading lady but a familiar face. Her credits include Das unsichtbare Visier (1973 and 1975), Rentner haben niemals Zeit (1978), Chirurgus Johann Paul Schroth (1981), the two-part drama Familie Rechlin (1982), Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort (1982), Ferienheim Bergkristall (1986 and 1987, as Martchen Schneeberger), the children's film Der Schulweg (1987), Kiezgeschichten (1987), Polizeiruf 110: Der Kreuzworträtselfall (1988, as a post office worker) and Eine Frau für drei (1989). Der Kreuzworträtselfall, based on a real 1981 child murder in Halle-Neustadt, drew 54.7 percent of viewers when first shown on 6 November 1988.

Krause started dubbing in 1960 and it became her main income from the mid-1970s and her second stage after reunification. The Deutsche Synchronkartei lists around 190 roles. She voiced Alice Hirson in Eine himmlische Familie (7th Heaven) from 1996 to 2007, the old woman in Anastasia (1997), Jira in Star Wars: Episode I, Frances Bay as Dottie in The Wedding Planner (2001), Charmian May as Mrs Darcy in Bridget Jones (2001) and Lynn Cohen as Magda in Sex and the City 2 (2010). Her voice was also heard in Friends, Frasier, Grey's Anatomy, The X-Files, ER and The Twilight Zone, and she narrated the documentary Schatten des Krieges: Das sowjetische Erbe. She also recorded many GDR radio plays from the 1970s onward.

Her daughter Velia Krause, born in Berlin on 7 July 1965, also became an actress, singer and voice actress and spent her early years largely with her grandmother Erna. In 1997, when Irmelin fell ill, she asked Velia to stand in for her at a song recital at two days' notice, which became the start of Velia's own solo programmes. Krause met her husband, Wolfgang Latarius (also named as Wolfgang Krause-Latarius), at Berlin's 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987, when she was almost 50.

Krause saw herself as a wholehearted actress who filled every role with everything she had. Asked where her energy came from, she pointed to her audiences: the joy you give, she said, comes back into your own heart. For her 60th stage anniversary she chose a motto from Robert Schumann about the artist's calling to send light into the depths of the human heart. In a SuperIllu interview she said she never accepted the ambiguous offers she encountered around casting, and that although she never had the great breakthrough, she was proud of her versatility.

Krause belonged to the generation of East German performers who worked across theatre, music, television, radio and dubbing at once. For many German viewers her voice is part of the sound of imported films and series of the 1990s and 2000s. Her daughter continues the family tradition of stage, song and dubbing.

On Tuesday 10 November 2026, shortly after 11 a.m., a 77-year-old woman manoeuvring her car on the cemetery car park on Konrad-Wolf-Straße in Alt-Hohenschönhausen, Berlin, struck and ran over Krause, then 88. The fire brigade attended with 22 personnel and a rescue helicopter and freed her from under the car, but resuscitation was unsuccessful and she died at the scene. The driver was taken to hospital in shock and another person was slightly injured. A police traffic accident unit and forensic officers investigated the cause. Her daughter confirmed her identity to SuperIllu on 11 November. Funeral arrangements had not been made public at the time of writing.