Nadja Tiller(1929-2023)

Austrian leading lady Nadja Tiller reached the height of her popularity during the 1950s and 60s. She was the daughter of stage actor and director Anton Tiller and his wife, the opera singer Erika Körner (1902-1979). It seemed that Nadja's career had been marked out for her early on: she was to take over a hairdressing establishment run by her grandparents in Danzig (now Gdansk). However, the war put paid to this. In 1945, having found a new calling, she enrolled at the Max-Reinhardt Seminar to take dance, ballet and drama classes while working part time as a mannequin in a hat salon. She completed her studies four years later at the University of Music and Performing Arts. That same year, Tiller was voted Miss Austria (she won again in 1951) which helped to secure her first theatrical engagement in the Theater in der Josefstadt. Her screen debut, a small part in the Beethoven biopic Eroica (1949) was cut, but she soon after made her first appearance in Märchen vom Glück (1949), a romantic musical comedy starring matinee idol O.W. Fischer. Tiller then played a rival to Hildegard Knef for the affections of Hardy Krüger in the melodrama Illusion in Moll (1952) and proceeded with leading roles in several undemanding lightweight farces like Einmal keine Sorgen haben (1953), Die Kaiserin von China (1953) and Mädchen mit Zukunft (1954). At his point in her career, Tiller's stock-in-trade heroines were most often worldly flirts or fashionable sophisticates.

Her fortunes took an upswing under the director Rolf Thiele who provided her with more challenging material in dramas like Friederike von Barring (1956), Lulu (1962) (both title roles) and, as an Egyptian dancer, in El Hakim (1957). In the repressed and conservative 50s, her breakout role as the titular prostitute in Thiele's socially conscious masterpiece Das Mädchen Rosemarie (1958) was viewed by some as scandalous and others as sensational, as it exposed the hypocrisy of people and institutions. Rosemary won not only the German Film Critics Award but also a Golden Globe in the U.S. for Best Foreign Language Film. Nadja Tiller emerged from this venture as an international star.

By the late 50s, Tiller featured prominently in many French, Italian, English and American productions, opposite stars like Jean Marais (La Tour, prends garde! (1958) and Pleins feux sur Stanislas (1965)), Jean Gabin (Le désordre et la nuit (1958)), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Tendre voyou (1966)), Rod Steiger (An einem Freitag um halb zwölf (1961)) and Yul Brynner (Poppies Are Also Flowers (1966)). From the mid-70s, having transitioned to character roles, she alternated appearances on television with theatrical engagements in Lübeck, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, often in boulevard dramas.

From 1956 until his death in 2011, Tiller was married to the actor Walter Giller. Dubbed the 'Traumpaar' (dream couple), they appeared in several films together, their last as two feisty pensioners in the comedy Dinosaurier (2009). Tiller passed away in a Hamburg retirement home on February 21 2023 at the age of 93.