Artists biographies
Barbara Auer

Barbara Auer was born in Constance, the city on the shores of the lake of the same name. Immediately after leaving school, she started a course at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Hamburg.

Having graduated, she spent the next five years as an actress at the civic theatres in Mainz, in Osnabrück und Wuppertal. Alongside the classics, Barbara Auer also played lead roles in plays by Botho Strauss and Peter Weiss, as well as appearing in musicals.

As early as 1982 she was discovered by film director Alexander Kluge, and has since appeared in numerous TV and cinema films. She is best known for her role as a self-confident East German crane operator in Vivian Naefe’s TV film “Der Boss aus dem Westen”. This won her the Goldene Kamera in 1988. She went on to win further awards: in 1991 for “Das Lachen der Maca Daracs” (Special Prize of the Akademie der Darstellenden Künste), in 1993 for “Meine Tochter gehört mir” (Deutscher Filmpreis – Filmband in Gold) and 1995 the Telestar for the best television acting performance (“Der grosse Abgang”).

Her roles in “Die Innere Sicherheit” (2000) and “Der Liebeswunsch” (2007) each won her a nomination for the Deutscher Filmpreis. The ZDF docu-drama series “Die Wölfe” won the 2009 Golden Nymph at the Monte Carlo TV Festival, and received numerous nominations. In addition, Barbara Auer has also worked on the production of various film versions of the “Donna Leon” novels (2000 to 2002) and in the ZDF production “Krupp – Eine deutsche Familie” (2009).

In spite of her numerous appearances on television and in the cinema, Barbara Auer has never lost her roots in the theatre, with its direct contact to the audience. Thus she appeared in the Burgtheater in Vienna as Roxanne in “Cyrano de Bergerac”. “Drei Mal Leben” (as Sonja) by Yasmina Reza ran at the Hamburger Kammerspielen until the end of May 2001 and was revived by the St. Pauli-Theater in 2005. From 2008 to 2010 Barbara Auer appeared at the St. Pauli-Theater in Yasmina Reza’s four-role play “Der Gott des Gemetzels”.