2023-11-10 15:00:00
©Andreas Hochgerner
Dieter Chmelar’s swipes of the month. The WBB Edelfeder about a royal comedienne who also looks fiftieth of all the 80s: Edith Leyrer has cut a dazzling figure on all stages for decades – whether with Bronner, next to Brandauer or in a night of dancing with Bernstein. In jest as in pain: what a heart!
She was born in the year when the bombing campaign returned to “Greater German” soil and also hit Vienna. 1943. To be more precise: On October 25, 1943, by the way, what a humorous coincidence, three days after Catherine Deneuve in Paris and three days before Conny Froboess in Brandenburg. Her parents, father a textile merchant from the deepest Waldviertel, mother a concert pianist from an upper middle class family, chose the trend-setting name for the beautiful, soon gifted and agile second-born: Edith means “the one who fights for her happiness” in Old English.
She literally took this to the extreme as a very young dancer, played an adorably hysterical casino loser in the Raimund Theater (“The Flower of Hawaii”) at the age of 15 and was hired straight away in Saarbrücken. After two years she was sent an advertisement in which the legendary Gerhard Bronner was looking for a “fairytale beauty”. Home to Vienna, a song in “Fledermaus” was enough for “Putzi” in the cabaret revue “Die Arche Novak”, but above all because the higher daughter also shone in the lowlands of the broadest dialect. Bronner liked to call her (quite incorrectly at the time) “Grammel 1”. Her sweet colleague Dolly Schmidinger was “Grammel 2”.
Lenny’s declaration of love
Thanks to Marcel Prawy, who selected her from 3,000 auditionees for the Volksoper, she gradually matured into “La Leyrer”. Leonard Bernstein saw her as the boyish, breast-bound “Anybodys” from the Jets in his global musical hit “Westside Story”, danced with her for a night after the premiere in the cult disco Atrium and then gave her a record in the Sacher with the dedication “ For a Great One, Lenny!” – in fact: she became a fixture. After appearances in the Josefstadt (for example in a Schnitzler alongside Klaus Maria Brandauer) or in the Kammerspiele (suspiciously kept down by the powerful Elfriede Ott), 15 seasons of Simpl (under Martin Flossmann) followed with 3,800 performances. Even at 80, she still has a fateful connection to cabaret: from November 12th, the grande dame will be a “Golden Girl” again, in a continuation of the classic in the comedy on the quay.
Late dream wedding
Speaking of fate – that played every role for Leyrer. Not just comedies. In 2021, Kittsee director Gerhard Ernst saved their very survival. He realized how weakly the notoriously lively and quicksilver woman was dragging herself along during the main rehearsal for “The Gigerln from Vienna” and immediately ordered her to be checked into the AKH. “I first had a pulse of 177, then 30 and had open-heart surgery for almost three hours,” remembers Edith, traumatized. “They put a pacemaker in me, but without anesthesia because there was no anesthesiologist available due to the pandemic. Unimaginable pain, five months break.” How lucky, however, was the late dream wedding with architect Heinz Busch in Las Vegas. Just days after their 50th, in 1993. At that time they decided to stay in the “honeymoon” until the end of their days. They are inseparable “because we two are like one,” although they have both sweated “every wedding anniversary without exception” since then. What is your strongest trait, Edith? “Gratitude,” she says within tenths of a second, “for everything I was able to experience. Do you know what should be written on my gravestone? ‘A happy person rests here’.”
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