Doris Kirchner(1930-2015)

Doris Kirchner was a pert brunette Austrian actress, frequently partnered alongside major box-office stars like Heinz Rühmann, O.W. Fischer, Hardy Krüger or Karlheinz Böhm in lightweight romantic comedies and rustic Heimatfilms of the post-war period. Kirchner studied drama at the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar in Vienna and debuted on stage in her home town Graz before enjoying a brief tenure at the famous Burgtheater. In films from 1950, she was usually cast as uncomplicated, if sometimes feisty, farmer's daughters or aspiring career girls. With the eventual decline in popularity of the Heimatfilm genre by the early 60s, a more seasoned Kirchner could be seen as a countess in period drama (La grande roue (1961)) or as a heroine in crime potboilers (such as La Malédiction du serpent jaune (1963) opposite the ever-reliable Joachim Fuchsberger). Five years before her retirement from screen acting in 1988, Kirchner took over operation of a Hamburg drama academy (the Bühnenstudio der darstellenden Künste, first established by dancer and actress Hedi Höpfner in 1959) where she taught diction and improvisation until sidelined by a stroke in 2003. She spent her final years in the dementia ward of a nursing home in Ahrensburg, near Hamburg. Doris Kirchner was respectively married and divorced from the cinematographer and director Helmuth Ashley and from writer/director Franz Josef Gottlieb.