Lilo Pempeit (born Liselotte Irmgard Pempeit; 6 October 1922 – 7 May 1993) was a German film and stage actress and literary translator. She is best known for her recurring appearances in the films of her son, New German Cinema director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and for her early German translations of Truman Capote’s prose.
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Early life and education
Pempeit was born in the Free City of Danzig (today Gdańsk, Poland) on 6 October 1922. During the final years of the Second World War she studied history and German philology at LMU Munich, later describing herself as “a refugee on the run who hid in libraries.”
In Munich she met medical officer Helmut Fassbinder, whom she married in 1945; their only child, Rainer Werner, was born the same year in Bad Wörishofen.
Career
After her 1951 divorce, Pempeit supported herself as a freelance translator of English and French fiction, beginning with Capote’s story collection Baum der Nacht for Limes Verlag in 1957, work that established her reputation in German publishing.
By the late 1960s, she also held a bookkeeping post at Munich’s Society for Radiation Research (today part of Helmholtz Zentrum München) while assisting her son’s cooperatively run Antiteater troupe.
Pempeit’s screen debut came in Fassbinder’s short Das kleine Chaos (1966), and between 1969 and 1982 she acted in twenty of his films and television productions, usually cast as waitresses, neighbours or mothers whose understated presence grounded his melodramas in everyday realism. Her spare, undemonstrative style drew critical notice in Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1969) and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and she later appeared in international festival successes such as The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and Veronika Voss (1982).
Following Fassbinder’s death in 1982 Pempeit ended her acting career, remarking that “the roles had always belonged to him.”
Filmography
1967– Das kleine Chaos
1970– Götter der Pest
1970– Warum läuft Herr R. Amok?
1971– Rio das Mortes
1971– Händler der vier Jahreszeiten
1972– Bremer Freiheit: Frau Geesche Gottfried – Ein bürgerliches Trauerspiel
1972– Oma und Gregor
1973– Welt am Draht
1974– Fontane Effi Briest
1974– Martha
1974– Nora Helmer
1974– Angst essen Seele auf
1975– Faustrecht der Freiheit
1975– Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel
1975– Angst vor der Angst
1976– Satansbraten
1977– Bolwieser (TV version)
1978– Despair – Eine Reise ins Licht
1978– Deutschland im Herbst
1978– In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden
1978– Die Ehe der Maria Braun
1979– Die dritte Generation
1980– Berlin Alexanderplatz (14-part miniseries)
Personal life
Following her 1959 marriage to Munich journalist Wolff Eder, she published under the name Liselotte Eder and continued translating, often collaborating with her husband. In 1986, she founded the non-profit Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation to administer her son’s intellectual property.
Pempeit died of cancer in Munich on 7 May 1993 at the age of 70.
