The actress Christine Schorn turns 80

berlin Alexanderplatz, late evening: Inge Herold, family psychologist, late thirties, divorced, mother of a teenage boy, sits alone in her apartment and waits. The man she longs for won't come. She made herself beautiful for him: big make-up, TV-ready. But what does “beautifully done” mean? She is beautiful in every scene of this film: when she gets out of bed in the morning with her hair crushed; when she smiles and flees into her own inner being as she has to listen to hopelessly quarreling spouses; when she cries – briefly – in the locker room after the doctor tells her she has a tumor in her breast; when she cockily stuffs fourteen bottles of champagne into her shopping cart after the diagnosis; when she stands in the bathroom in front of the mirror again three years after the operation and we see that she is missing a breast.

A “delicate, great film” is “The Unrest,” shot in 1982 by Lothar Warneke based on a script by Helga Schubert, and “the best one I have made so far,” said Christine Schorn three years ago. She played the main role as Inge, who suffered from breast cancer but was indestructible in her ability to be happy. Schorn was angry in 2019 because public television no longer wanted to broadcast this DEFA film, which had been shown on RBB on her sixtieth birthday, even though she had received the German Acting Prize for her life's work on her 75th birthday.

“DEFA films were terrible. At that time in Paris, where I was studying, they were only shown in the Communist Party cinema. We went in there and laughed,” DEFA liquidator Volker Schlöndorff said in 2008, sentences that dripped with ignorance and arrogance. “The Anxiety”, shot like a documentary in black and white by the recently deceased cameraman Thomas Plenert, is one of the most beautiful films from DEFA and European cinema, on a par with “Une histoire simple” by Claude Sautet with Romy Schneider and Bruno Cremer.

Schorn came to the cinema late, but was hired at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin when he was just nineteen, fresh out of drama school. The challenging sensuality, which revealed in her look and tone (not necessarily in her words) that there was nothing this girl didn't already know, made her recha in Lessing's “Nathan the Wise” an event as early as 1966. The piece was updated not through a “relocation” to another time, but through Schorn’s voice and physicality. She played at the Deutsches Theater for over fifty years, most recently in Jürgen Gosch's production as the old nanny in Anton Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya”. Jens Harzer, her stage colleague as Astrow, was fascinated by Schorn's “total independence” and “resistance”.

She draws the audience towards her rather than playing towards them: “I like to be searched for on stage,” she once said, “if anyone is interested in me, they will find me.” She loves it when she is given freedom leave and wait for what she offers. “When someone asks me to do something, I don’t function.”

The calm sovereignty with which she allows her beauty to shine as a light of inner freedom and self-affirmation in “Distress” is just as much an acting achievement as the inhibited wife in Werner Bergmann's 1978 film “Nachtspiele”, which also seems very French: completely nervous , almost turned into a puppet, until in an unobserved moment a goblin of exuberance emerges from this puppet. In an inner monologue she describes her existence as a housewife: “My work is endless repetition. My rhythm is determined by the duties of others: the husband's work, the son's school, the child's growth, the morning, the evening and sometimes the night.

This is directly followed by the black and white film “Tonight and Tomorrow Morning” by Dietmar Hochmuth, again a tender, great prose poem based on a text by Helga Schubert, 1980. You see Schorn as a dentist who, on the way home from the Charité to her apartment, takes a moratorium on having to function and on the duties of others. Here, with raised eyebrows and an indulgent smile that combines skepticism and approval, with sentences spoken into the void in the presence of others, she finds a cheerful balance of care and being for herself, a gentle technique of self-affirmation without intruding on others . Through her roles, she plays the acquiescence to finiteness, which at the same time wrests self-determined time.

Christine Schorn has now made over 150 films, most of them after 1990; She received the German Film Prize twice. In the meantime, she's a little obsessed with the funny old woman in the cinema with cancer or dementia who growls out her punchlines defensively. She herself considers Margaret Rutherford, “the old face” (original sound Schorn), to be a good role model over seventy. But it would be nice for this outstanding character actress, who avoids castings, to make another “tender, great” film, perhaps based on Helga Schubert’s “Book of Hours of Love” with Andreas Dresen as director. Today Christine Schorn is only eighty years old.