For Ruth Maria Kubitschek’s 90th birthday.
If there was a kind of life discipline that honors graceful aging, Ruth Maria Kubitschek would be the undisputed champion. The instructions for her book of the same name from 2013 would not have been necessary. A few cursory glances at her late theatrical work would have been enough to recognize her ladylike grandeur, which also made wit, cleverness and intellectual independence visible in small series roles.
The recognition of her enormous television presence, which she then declared ended in 2014 at the age of 83, negligently suppresses an impressive start into acting, which initially took her to numerous theaters in the GDR in the early 1950s, to Halle, Schwerin and the Berlin theater of friendship, today’s theater on the Parkaue.
She took on her first role in front of the camera in 1953 in the Defa film “Jackets Like Pants” directed by Eduard Kubat, a piece of emancipation from the working world of the GDR, in which the women of a steel company get their recognition and their authorization to do the same work to perform like men have to fight first. Three years later, Kubitschek can also be seen in the GDR historical drama “Thomas Müntzer – a film of German history”, which the western side accused of misrepresenting history on behalf of ideology.
The political times also had an impact on the life of Ruth Maria Kubitschek, who was born in 1931 in the Czech Komotau. After a long theater engagement in the West, she did not return to the GDR in 1959 and initially succeeded on West German theaters. Her Defa career did not end there, however. She was still involved in films that came out after her escape, such as “Life Begins” by Heiner Carow and “Der schweigende Stern”, the GDR’s first ever science fiction film. Her first film in the West was then “Die Sendung der Lysistrata”, Fritz Kortner’s TV debut, in which she played alongside Romy Schneider and Barbara Rütting and was immediately involved in a social scandal. The ARD stations of several CDU-governed countries wanted to forego the broadcast. The film is morally offensive and politically one-sided. A representative of the nuclear armament is caricatured in an inadmissible way, so the allegation.
In the course of the political conflict phase in the Federal Republic of Germany, Ruth Maria Kubitschek then became “the Kubitschek”, especially through the Franco-German film “I sleep with my murderer” from 1970, which addresses the loosening of sexual morality, but criticizes it had to be a “absurd erotic drama”.
Where tiny gestures are enough
From then on, Ruth Maria Kubitschek was well booked for crime and family series before she found her star roles in two series by Helmut Dietl in the ironic 80s and renewed the series profile with subtle wit and weird drama. At the side of Helmut Fischer she was the “Spatzl” in “Monaco Franze”, while she gave the publisher of the Munich “Abendzeitung”, Anneliese Friedmann, an unmistakable figure in “Kir Royal”, a parody of the Munich crowd. Charm, unscrupulousness and hubris – the actress sometimes let it all flash with tiny gestures and slowly turned into the phase of dignified aging.
Ruth Maria Kubitschek was married to the director and later Berlin opera manager Götz Friedrich until 1962; their son Alexander, who was born in 1957, was born out of his marriage. From the mid-1970s until his death in 2016, she was in a relationship with the television producer Wolfgang Rademann, in whose successful series “Das Traumschiff” she occasionally appeared.
In her actual late work, however, she devoted herself to writing and painting. She published around a dozen works in various genres in which the all-rounder, who is celebrating her 90th birthday today, processes her intensive preoccupation with esoteric topics, age-wise and in a relaxed manner.
