Although her film career was brief, Brigitte Mira made a notable impact on German cinema in the '70s due to her superb performances in many of Rainer Fassbinder's best films from that decade. Mira died of natural causes at a Berlin hospital on March 8. She was 94.

She was born on April 20, 1910 in Hamburg, Germany. Her father was a Russian immigrant who was a pianist and music teacher. Mira developed a taste for performing music at a young age, and by the time she was 19, she made her professional stage debut in Cologne as Esmeralda in The Bartered Bride. She went on to perform in many operettas in Germany and Austria, and became a formidable cabaret performer by the late 40's.

She made her film debut in An Evenings in the Scala in 1958, and scored a minor hit that year with another comedy That Star of Santa Clarita. For the next 15 years, Mira was a popular fixture in lightweight film comedies and variety shows on German television. It wasn't until she starred as an observant barmaid in the Ulli Lommel's thriller The Tenderness of Wolves (1973), did one filmmaker see her potential as a character actress with some depth. That director was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He brought out her vulnerability and unpretentious nature in two of his best films: Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) in which she played a lonely, elderly widow who falls in love with an Arab immigrant; and of course, her star turn in the brilliant political satire Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1975), as a naive housewife whose husband goes on a homicidal-suicidal rampage, and then has her grief exploited by various, self-serving lobbying groups. Other Fassbinder movies she appeared in included Fox and His Friends (1976), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Lili Marleen (1981). When Fassbinder died of a drug overdose in 1982, she stopped appearing in theatrical films altogether, but remained an active performer on the stage and television in her native country. Mira had been married five times, and her last husband, Frank Guerente, died in 1983. She had no children.

by Michael T. Toole