Berlin (dpa) – It wasn’t just a big deal for Heike Makatsch. At the beginning of the 1990s, the music channel Viva started with its brave, garish mess. Makatsch started out as a presenter and now works as an actress. She will be 50 years old on Friday (August 13th).
The former teenagers who turned on the television after school have grown up with Makatsch. Heard their interviews and hoped for their tips. “Everyone was watching the same thing at the same time,” said Makatsch, according to the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger” in autumn 2020. “That seems anachronistic today. Everyone watches their own thing on their smartphone – I guess! »
While the success of Viva fizzled out at some point and a piece of television history finally came to an end when the station was switched off, Makatsch has worked hard. She played the singer Hildegard Knef, stubborn and convincing. Or sang and danced a while ago in the musical film “I’ve never been to New York” to the music of Udo Jürgens.
And wait a minute, there is also «Indeed … love». An episode film that many people regularly bring out again at Christmas. Various stories from London are told. Makatsch plays the beautiful Mia who wants to seduce her boss (“Harry Potter” star Alan Rickman). Anyone who knows the film knows that the whole thing ends with a sad scene for the wife.
Makatsch sometimes shares excerpts from the past on Instagram. An old clip with author and presenter Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, for example. In it, the audience should guess songs – “Congratulations, Heike brings the champagne”. Or she posts pictures of today, as she is out and about at the “Fridays for Future” protest and at photo shoots or calls for donations for refugees.
«So many lives fit into a single life. I often think that it was a completely different person who did what I did when I was 20, ”said Makatsch in an interview with the“ Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger ”. Born in Düsseldorf, Makatsch tried his hand at studying after graduating from high school, dropped out and began an apprenticeship as a tailor. Then it landed on Viva and later on «Bravo TV».
If you read reports from that time, it seems as if a new species had been invented with her and other women from that time. The «Girlie». “But while the girlie was declared a non-person at record speed, Heike Makatsch was suddenly in demand,” writes the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” in 1996. In just under two years, Makatsch had “become everyone’s favorite woman”, “a kind of female Jürgen Klinsmann”. The “Spiegel” found that she had what it takes to become the “Goldie Hawn of German film”.
But it’s such a thing with comparisons. At the time, Makatsch had just shot her first big film with “Männerpension”. For this she won a Bavarian film award. Many films followed. For example, the adaptation of the novel “The Heads of My Loved Ones” and the blockbuster “Resident Evil”. In the meantime she lived in London. For a while she was with actor Daniel Craig (“James Bond”). Today she lives with family in Berlin.
When Makatsch appears in public, the cameras follow her very reliably to this day. An interview doesn’t work for reasons of time, according to the management. So, let’s try an older quote again. Makatsch said something to the “Tagesspiegel” in 2018 that can still be written down well and wisely on Post-its. Makatsch did not wish for the carelessness of that time, it said in the text, to return. “You learn over the years, and learning also means: losing something,” she was quoted as saying. «You lose a certain form of naivety. But you gain a more decisive and conscious approach to things. “