The “Miss Austria”who became a movie star and Salzburg’s paramour

Italy’s post-war cinema had Sophia Loren (88) and Gina Lollobrigida (1927–2023), the Austrian Nadja Tiller (1929–2023). At first glance, the career of the native of Vienna seems as if a woman understood the circumstances of a historically uncertain time and used the charisma and body with curves that Liselotte Pulver (93) envied her for and discovered them as capital.

In fact, Tiller (like Loren and Lollobrigida) took on a much more conscious role – in the prudery of the 1950s she translated repressed eroticism into a public image of a woman, in Tiller’s case that of the German Rosemarie Nitribitt (1933–1957). A sex worker who is said to have been in the service of elite circles and was murdered. The perpetrator remained a phantom, nitrititt – as “noble prostitute” a crime sensation – became part of cultural memory.

Tiller embodied in the scandal film “The girl Rosemary” (1958) the killed. Or rather, she had dared to do it. Because of the explosive case, everyone involved in the film should have feared for their reputation.

Next to “rosemary” Tiller played more than 125 other roles, including in films with Yul Brynner and Rita Hayworth (“Poppy is also a flower”1966), Jean Paul Belmondo (“Beloved villain”1966) and Jean Marais (“Killers’ rendezvous”, 1965). After “The girl Rosemary” Tiller had offers from directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Carlo Visconti and Federico Fellini for “La dolce vita”.

But Tiller refused all “bad advice” away. From an Austrian point of view, her love affair at the Salzburg Festival (1967, 1968) was more significant than splashing around in the Trevi Fountain for Fellini. She later had permanent theater engagements in Lübeck, Berlin and Vienna, where Tiller had lost her engagement at the Theater in der Josefstadt in 1949. She was in a bathing suit “Miss Austria” been chosen, so she went to television.

The daughter of an opera singer and an actor had never flirted with her parents’ profession as a child. As a hairdresser, she wanted to take over her grandparents’ salon in Gdansk, but then the Second World War came.

As exciting as her career was, her marriage to Walter Giller, whom she married on the set in 1953, seemed just as harmonious “hit parade” met, with him she had daughter Natascha and son Jan. “I’ve been very lucky.”