Jessika Cardinahl’s first encounter with Otto is reminiscent of a scene from a comedy of mistaken identity. The nineteen-year-old, who was also under contract with the Parker-Sed Model Agency in Hamburg during her training as a graphic designer, thought she was at a casting for the catalog of the Otto mail order company in 1984 when Otto Waalkes suddenly stood in front of her. The comedian from East Friesland was one of the most famous faces in the German entertainment industry at the time. Shows like “So ein Otto” and “Help, Otto is coming” as well as records with skits somewhere between slapstick and parody were ratings hits. “Otto said he was planning a film now. I was one of 20 candidates for the female lead,” remembers Cardinahl said: “I thought it would be a change of lane for me too, a great adventure.”
The mixture of surprise and euphoria is still noticeable on this summer’s day, almost four decades later. For a meeting in the Californian coastal town of Santa Monica, Cardinahl got into the car a good three hours earlier in Santa Barbara, where she has lived for several years. In the midst of the yoga mothers who, after the morning school run with the offspring and before the next asanas, meet for a hibiscus tea in the “Caffe Luxxe” on Montana Avenue, she immediately catches the eye: tall, without make-up or botox and in an unusually European trench coat for this latitude.
Almost 15 million moviegoers
Her appearance, says Cardinahl, also helped her get the part in “Otto – Der Film”. With almost 15 million moviegoers in East and West Germany, it was one of the most successful German post-war films to date. “After a short rehearsal scene, I got the role alongside one of Germany’s greatest comedians,” says Cardinahl. “Of course I was thrilled.” She left Parker-Sed and was represented by Alex Grob, the manager of her then partner Al Corley. Cardinahl met the American actor (the blonde Steven Carrington from the series “The Denver Clan”) in a Hamburg bar.
The fifty-eight-year-old remembers the weeks after meeting Otto and being offered her first film role rather fragmentarily. “When Rialto sent the contract, Alex said it was fine. I signed.” Three months of shooting in Berlin followed with her as the aristocrat’s daughter Silvia, who is rescued by Otto, later survives a plane crash with him and finally falls in love with him.
The thought of the work on the set and the dinners of the film crew, accompanied by Otto’s jokes, still makes the Hamburg native smile today. When asked about the fee she received, a trace of bitterness spreads. “Even then, the 20,000 marks didn’t feel like a lot,” says Cardinahl. But she saw the role as an investment in a career in front of the camera. Finally, Horst Wendlandt, then head of the Rialto and, as the producer of the “Winnetou” films, a king-maker of German film, also offered to pay for her acting training. “When I became pregnant after filming, he suddenly withdrew the offer,” says Cardinahl of the producer, who died in the summer of 2002.
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