She died on Sunday evening in Berlin at the age of 79, as lawyer Peter Raue announced on Monday on behalf of the family of her husband Hans Neuenfels (1941-2022). Trissenaar played the role of lover several times in Salzburg’s “Everyman”.
Trissenaar was born on April 13, 1944 in Vienna, the daughter of a Dutch doctor. During her acting training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, she met her future husband, the director Hans Neuenfels. In 1966 their son Benedict was born, who is successful as a cameraman (“The Falsifiers”).
Marriage and princess
The first theater works took Trissenaar and Neuenfels to Krefeld. She played in Bochum and with Peter Palitzsch at the Stuttgart State Theater. Trissenaar worked at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Burgtheater, the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Schauspiel Köln. In Berlin she worked with Neuenfels at the Volksbühne from 1985 to 1990, and from 2001 she played at the Deutsches Theater there. There she played the role of Kennedy’s widow Jackie O. in Elfriede Jelinek’s play “Jackie and Other Princesses”, written especially for Trissenaar. The director, as in dozens of other joint productions, was her husband Neuenfels.
From 1987 to 1989, Elisabeth Trissenaar embodied the romance in Salzburg’s “Everyman” alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer. She played great female characters such as Ibsen’s “Nora” and “Hedda Gabler”, Kleist’s “Penthesilea” and Euripides’ “Elektra”, Gretchen in Goethe’s “Faust”, Varya in Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard”, Lessing’s “Emilia Galotti” and Strindberg’s “Fräulein”. “Julie”.
Corners, edges and neuroses
In Fassbinder’s “Bolwieser” in 1976, the actress played the unfaithful wife of a station master. She was also seen in his works “In a Year with 13 Moons” (1978), “The Marriage of Maria Braun” (1979) and as Lina in the film adaptation of Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1980). She didn’t play smooth roles, but rather women with rough edges and neuroses.
She filmed with Doris Dörrie (“Nobody Loves Me”), Robert van Ackeren (“The Other Smile”), Agnieszka Holland (“Bitter Harvest”) and Rainer Kaufmann (“Cold is the Evening Breath”). Trissenaar stood in front of the camera for Michael Herbig in “The Story of Brandner Kaspar” and filmed “I’ve Never Been So Happy” alongside Devid Striesow and Nadja Uhl.
