Hannelore Elsner

After finishing drama school in Munich, she was engaged at the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Kleine Komödie am Max II. She made history as the first actress to appear nude on stage at the Kammerspiele. Her first film, Alt Heidelberg, came in 1959 when she was just 17. Years later, director Edgar Reitz cast her in a lead role opposite Elke Sommer in the 1973 film Die Reise nach Wien, which brought her first work outside Germany. She became a familiar face in popular productions like Die Schwarzwaldklinik, but her career-defining role came as Inspector Lea Sommer in the detective series Die Kommissarin. From 1994 to 2006, she played the title character across 66 episodes, becoming the first woman to play an inspector in a German television series.

Elsner earned international recognition for her lead role in the 2000 film Die Unberührbare, also known as No Place to Go. The black-and-white film, written and directed by Oskar Roehler, recounts the last days of a writer closely based on Gisela Elsner, who had died by suicide in 1992. It was entered at the Cannes Film Festival and won Elsner the German Film Award, the German Critics' Prize, and the Bavarian Film Award. In 2003, she won another German Film Award for Best Actress for My Last Film, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. In 2005, she received the German Order of Merit for her campaign against AIDS, and in 2006 she was given the Bavarian Film Award for her life's work.

Beyond acting, Elsner participated in audio plays and read audio books. She was also active in an association devoted to remembering the Holocaust. In 2011, she published her memoirs, Im Überschwang: Aus meinem Leben, which describe her upbringing and the tragic events of her childhood. She was married three times: to actor Gerd Vespermann from 1964 to 1966, to director Alf Brustellin until his death in 1981, and to Uwe B. Carstensen from 1993 to 2000. In 1981, she had a son with director Dieter Wedel. Her last completed film was Cherry Blossoms and Demons by Doris Dörrie. She died of cancer in a Munich clinic on 21 April 2019. Hanns-Georg Rodek, writing in Die Welt, called her "a national institution... wild, seductive and independent." The broadcaster BR changed its programming in her honor, airing films she appeared in and an interview with her.