Gaby Köster turns 60: a woman with two birthdays

Gaby Köster is a well-known TV star in Germany. In the Cologne biotope of the Rhenish cheerful natures from RTL and WDR, she succeeded as a tamer version of her friend Hella von Sinnen (62) and made a remarkable career as an actress, comedian and cabaret artist. This woman will be 60 years old on December 2nd.

Actually there are two people called Gaby Köster. One before January 2008, the other after, because “Gaby Köster is no longer Gaby Köster when she wakes up from her artificial coma,” wrote the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. The popular Cologne woman suffered a severe stroke that January 2008.

Before that, she was the equally successful and popular comedy woman who, after appearing in the alternative carnival and on WDR, had worked her way up into the first guard of RTL stars. She belonged to the permanent ensemble of the TV show “7 Days, 7 Heads” by Rudi Carrell, she had her own comedy series with “Rita’s World”, was a star in films such as “The Bull’s Bride”, shone as a satirist in her solo The program “The stupidest praline in the world” was showered with awards and prizes (Bambi, German TV Prize, Adolf Grimme Prize).

The “Queen of Comedy” was touring Germany with her stage program “Whoever wants cream, must shake cows” – when everything suddenly came to an end. Tour canceled, the main actress fell ill, the rest was a private matter. So it was said. The loud, happy bundle of energy Gaby Köster, daughter of a jazz musician, fell silent overnight.

Years of time off

Until 2011, it remained “lost behind a wall of silence”, as it was formulated. Your management only announced that they would express themselves at a time of their choosing. Then she told me about her “drissdrecksdrisseligen” stroke and all the “driss” that has been happening to her since 2008. People from Cologne say “Driss” when the “Sch” word is too vulgar for them.

On January 9th, 2008, her left arm felt numb, she wasn’t particularly worried, who thinks of a stroke at 46? Gaby Köster went into the bathroom – and passed out.

Later she had “reconstructed:” I had worked a lot and also had a strange allergy. As a result, my blood pressure was in the basement, as a result of which I fell. My side fell on the heater and the carotid artery was pinched off. That triggered the stroke because the blood supply was no longer correct. “Her mother found her and called the emergency doctor. A dangerous brain edema had developed in her head, an emergency operation saved her life. She was in an artificial coma for three weeks.

The horror afterwards

Then she woke up. “It was horror,” she said in her first interview with Stern TV in 2011. At first she didn’t understand what was going on. “I always wanted to get up and go somewhere, and then a sister came in and said: Going with me is really bad at the moment.” The left side of her body was paralyzed.

She had to learn everything again: talk, walk, drive, cry. Speaking works so well again that in 2018 she went on tour with her solo program “Sitcom”. Walking is more difficult because the left leg (and the left arm) are numb and “I move like a stick doll”. She then needs outside help, mostly she is in a wheelchair. Driving a car is flawless, although she is often annoyed by SUV drivers who “block two handicapped parking spaces at the same time with their huge city forester’s carriages”.

Crying was difficult too, she had no tears for over ten years. Then her son Donald Köller (from the divorced marriage with the director Thomas Köller) went to Argentina for nine months. When her “beloved child” hugged her to say goodbye and began to cry, it “went straight to her heart. When Donald asked me,” What about Christmas now? “It broke me up … Me hadn’t cried for ten years, but at that moment all the dams were broken. There was no holding back. All the tears that hadn’t flowed for ten years streamed out of me. ” This is how she described her rediscovered crying to the magazine.

The arduous way back

She has worked her way up again because “giving up” is boring. She just doesn’t like suffering. “There are things that happen around you that are too beautiful to be entangled and suffer, that’s nonsense. And it doesn’t make it any better.”

In an interview with, she even said that Gaby Köster was happier after the stroke than the one before, “because I notice a lot of things differently that I used to only notice when shooting past”. She would like to call out to old healthy Gaby: “Don’t do too much and enjoy life.” At the time of “Rita’s World” she “didn’t notice anything about life outside, except when driving home after filming”.

Also, before, she was never proud of anything she had done. “But I’m so proud that I was able to keep my finca in Ibiza, despite all the driss.” This “beautiful hand-made” Ibizan farmhouse is her “courage to face life. It gives me strength and energy. Every stay in this house pushes me forward and makes my life worth living”.

She has now written three books. The first “A cold would have been enough – my second chance” was filmed with Anna Schudt (47) as Gaby Köster. The film received the International Emmy Award in 2018. In 2015 her first novel “Die Chefin” came out, the story of a rock singer who gets into trouble. And most recently, “Life is great – there was never any talk of simple”, the description of her second life.

Friendships and a relationship broke up

A previous relationship from her first life did not survive the effects of the illness. She was “eaten up by the events and that’s all I want to say about it,” she writes in her first book. Her sense of humor helped her get over it. “That and my mother and my son and a couple of friends. Friends have also vanished into thin air. But that is not bad, there were also new ones. They must have seen that there is no horrific improvement, and that came with it not right. It’s a good thing that it sorts itself out. “

She tried to make new contacts with men via the dating app Tinder. “That was mega-trash,” she said in the “Morgenpost” interview. “A lot of people just wanted to meet a celebrity … I now prefer to meet people from a very early age who have had a lot behind them too, that’s also quite amusing. I’m not looking. That comes up at some point or not. That’s how I am Happy too. I don’t need a tripod to survive (Köster slang for “man”) … If a relationship, then only on an outpatient basis, no more inpatients. I couldn’t live together anymore, I’m much too chaotic. “

Two years ago she actually announced a “new man in my life”: Charlito – a small dog from Ibiza. She can imagine a life without men, but not without dogs because, according to Loriot, she recognized: “A life without a dog is possible, but pointless.”

Gaby Köster defends herself against the formulation that she has fought her way back to life. “For me, fighting always has something to do with violence. With defeating. I don’t want that at all. I want to let it flow, I swam with the flow. I just keep going. If I’m unlucky, my condition remains as it is he is, but I can live with it. “