Actress: “Amaryllis” for her 70th: Jutta Speidel’s birthday

Jutta Speidel gave herself a big present for her 70th birthday: she has just brought her first novel onto the market. It’s called “Amaryllis” – like the flower – and tells the story of the artist Valerie, who makes a breakthrough together with her childhood sweetheart, but then falls more and more into the background, behind the circus backdrop, and is increasingly in the shadow of her husband .

It is certainly no coincidence that Speidel, who has been in the film and television business for more than five decades, is telling this story before her 70th birthday (March 26). At the beginning of the year, a joint interview with her and her acting colleagues Michaela May and Gisela Schneeberger appeared in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” magazine, in which the three women complain bitterly about the subterranean selection of roles for women their age.

“Cliché old woman”

“I just don’t understand what’s so disreputable about making good television for people over 50,” Speidel said in the interview, complaining, “because we’re now cast as cliche old women. That’s the only way we seem interchangeable. “

“Those who promote film, the television editors, the directors are responsible,” said Speidel in the SZ magazine. “They obviously don’t know any old women – and if they do, they’ve never really listened to them. That’s ignorance. Disrespect and ignorance.”

Speidel knows the film business. She was just 15 years old when she made her first film at the end of the 1960s: the school film “Pepe, the Crammer Terror”. It was actually just an extra role, but because Speidel was sitting directly behind “Pepe”, the famous Hansi Kraus, the film industry took notice of her – and she became a real actress.

Since then, Speidel has appeared in more than 150 film and television productions, for example in Rainer Erler’s thriller “Fleisch” in 1979, in “Three Are One Too Many”, in the series “All My Daughters” (from 1995), in “For Heaven’s Sake” with Fritz Wepper. She said in the interview with SZ magazine that she was initially enthusiastic about the successful series, which has since been canceled. “A nun without make-up! Everyone else suddenly seemed to have make-up on and looked like they had been lifted. But then a nun story became a mayor story – with nuns. What great material that would have been if we just looked at what nuns are all about achieve! But it is always so incredibly important that men are there.”

“First Dates” – all fake?

In 2012 she filmed the romance “We Don’t Have a Car” with her then partner, Bruno Maccallini, who became known as the “Melitta Man”. Speidel is now officially solo and was even recently looking for a man on the dating show “First Dates” – at least that’s how it seemed. She later told the “Bild” newspaper that it was all “fake”, that the man was an actor and that she was only there to draw attention to her association “Horizont”, which she founded in 1997 and which is very close to her heart .

The association supports homeless mothers and their children, is financed with donations and, if everything goes well, will soon get a third house, as Speidel said shortly before her birthday. Women and children receive accommodation and assistance there so that they can return to a self-determined life.

“I set out on a completely new path in my late 40s. The children were out of the house, I got a second wind. I had energy and time and desire again, more than in my mid-30s,” Speidel told the SZ -“Magazine”. “I became a businesswoman and now have 56 employees. I never see a story like that in the movies. This second breath that many women get – and not because their husband left them or because he died. But simply because of themselves .”