Regina Ziegler

Regina Ziegler died unexpectedly in the night to Sunday 1 November 2026 in a Berlin hospital, aged 82, with her family with her. Her daughter Tanja Ziegler confirmed the death to Bild, which reported it first, and a spokesperson for Ziegler Film confirmed it to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Tanja Ziegler marked the day with a photograph of her mother on Instagram captioned "In Liebe" (With love). No cause of death was made public.

Ziegler had appeared in public only weeks earlier, at a Berlin premiere in October 2026, and was still working on new projects. Earlier in the year she had told Bild that she intended to live to 100 and keep producing until then. Her death was reported across the German press, including Der Spiegel, Focus, RTL and the Berliner Kurier, which described her as one of the most formative figures of German film and television. Funeral arrangements had not been announced.

Regina Ziegler was born Regina Krömer on 8 March 1944 in Quedlinburg, in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, the daughter of a journalist and of a well builder who also worked as a water diviner. At the end of the Second World War the family fled west to Obernkirchen in the Weserbergland, where she and her older sister grew up. Her mother worked as a local reporter for the Schaumburger Zeitung in Rinteln, also wrote film reviews, and often took her daughter to the cinema.

After her Abitur in 1964 she moved to Berlin with her first husband, Hartmut Ziegler. At her parents' wish she began studying law at the Free University of Berlin, hoping to become a youth court judge, but she left after one semester. She trained instead as a business interpreter for English, though she never worked in that field.

In 1965 Ziegler joined the West Berlin broadcaster Sender Freies Berlin, starting as a general assistant and staying several years as a production assistant. In the early 1970s she worked for the director Rosa von Praunheim, including as production manager on Berliner Bettwurst, and gained her first experience of film production.

In 1973, a year after her divorce, she founded the Regina Ziegler Filmproduktion, becoming the first woman in Germany to run her own film production company in what was then an almost entirely male business. Her first feature, Ich dachte, ich wäre tot (I Thought I Was Dead), was the directing debut of Wolf Gremm, whom she had met at SFB, and it won a German Federal Film Prize. Further films with Gremm followed, among them Die Brüder (1976) and Fabian (1980).

In her early years she concentrated on promoting young and little known directors. Her productions included Jeanine Meerapfel's Malou (1981), which won the FIPRESCI international critics' prize at Cannes, November Days, which won the Adolf Grimme Prize, and Krzysztof Zanussi's A Year of the Quiet Sun, winner of the Golden Lion in Venice. She also worked with Volker Schlöndorff, Andrzej Wajda and Ulrich Schamoni, and two of her productions were nominated for Academy Awards.

Later she produced mainly for television, including the comedy series Familie Bundschuh and the ARD drama Weissensee, set in East Berlin, as well as the musical film Ich war noch niemals in New York. In all she made around 500 films and series, and she ran her company independently of the large media groups. Her daughter Tanja joined the firm in 2000, the year it became Ziegler Film, and has held the majority of its shares since 2006.

From 2005 she was an honorary professor of film and television production at the Konrad Wolf film university in Potsdam-Babelsberg, and from 2011 she and her daughter ran the Berlin arthouse cinema Filmkunst 66. She also served on the jury of the 44th Venice International Film Festival. Her autobiography, Geht nicht gibt's nicht, written with Andrea Stoll, appeared in October 2017.

Ziegler's first marriage, to Hartmut Ziegler, ended in divorce in 1972. Their daughter Tanja Ziegler, born in 1966, later became her business partner. In 1977 she married the director Wolf Gremm, with whom she worked for decades. He died of cancer in 2015 after 44 years together, and she later spoke openly about their life during his illness, saying they had watched Humphrey Bogart films at night and cooked spaghetti at four in the morning.

She lived in Berlin-Schlachtensee. Politically she described herself as a swing voter, and in 2013 she started the Facebook campaign Sag Ja zu Angela in support of Chancellor Angela Merkel; in 2016 she was one of the initiators of a roses campaign thanking Merkel for her refugee policy. In the summer of 2026 she celebrated her daughter's wedding in the Black Forest.

Ziegler is remembered as a pioneer who opened film production in Germany to women and who built one of the country's most prolific independent production houses. Her career was marked by early support for young directors, international art house successes and, later, popular television drama such as Weissensee.

When she received the honorary German Film Award in 2016, the president of the German Film Academy, Iris Berben, praised her passion, energy, charm, determination and endless love for her craft. Ziegler herself put her success down to courage and persistence, saying that a no did not always have to stay a no and that if you were thrown out of the front door you came back in through the back door.