RIP Carl-Hermann Risse

 

From bricklayer to professor of directing: Carl-Hermann Risse has died

As an actor Carl-Hermann Risse experienced the great Benno Besson years at the Volksbühne, then directed himself and became "Ernst Busch" professor.

 

Berliner Zeitung

By Ulrich Seidler

10/19/2022

 In the last years of his career, until 2007, Carl-Hermann Risse worked at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. The students will have taken the opportunity to squeeze out the humorous, attentive and versatile professor of directing and let him tell about his rich theater life, which was now coming to an end. Risse was 80 years old.

Born in Dresden in 1942, he unconsciously experienced the horrors of war and later chose a profession that was needed at the time: bricklayer. At the age of twenty he changed his saddle and trained at the Dresden Acting Studio, got his first engagements in Stendal and Schwerin, before he won the big ticket in the Theater Lotto and was engaged at the Volksbühne in 1968, one year before Benno Besson took over the house first as artistic director and then as artistic director.

With Besson throughout Europe

Risse was cast as party secretary in Heiner Müller's "Weiberkomödie", directed by Fritz Marquardt, and also played with Besson, for example in "Das letzte Paradies" and in "Der gute Mensch von Sezuan", with which Besson finally became a superstar of the Brecht Theater and was invited throughout Europe. Risse, who also worked as a dubbing actor and actor at Defa and on television, remained at the Volksbühne until 1984, began to direct himself, forged friendships with the actor Henry Hübchen and with the director Manfred Karge, among others, but also got the leaden time there after Besson had gone to the West.

After that, the then artistic director Siegfried Wein brought him to the Theater der Freundschaft as senior director, where Risse remained until the fall of the Berlin Wall and then worked as a freelance director and actor before becoming a professor of directing in 1995. On Tuesday evening, Carl-Hermann Risse, known as Charly, died peacefully surrounded by his family in hospital, as Siegfried Wein confirmed to the Berliner Zeitung.

RISSE, Carl-Hermann

Born: 1942, Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Died: 10/19/2022, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

 

Carl-Hermann- Risse’s western – actor:

Blue Bird - 1979