Television: Millions know him from “Sesame Road”: Horst Janson dead

Many people do not manage to exude charm in old age. But Horst Janson could do that. Even at well over 80 years, it was not difficult to recognize the teacher student “Bastian” in him or the wiry artists from “Salto Mortale”.

For his 85th birthday a few years ago, he published his biography “The 85-year-old, who got up and was still young in the morning”. Now the actor at the age of 89 has died, as his wife Hella confirmed to the German Press Agency in Grünwald near Munich. According to the family of the family, Armin Rosenbach, Janson died “a few days ago”. “He fell asleep peacefully.”

Janson was married to his second wife Hella for more than 40 years – and he stood in front of the camera even longer: after working on theater stages during and immediately after school – he had one of his first appearances as a student in the barbecue parzer piece ” The dream, a life ” – he got his first film role in” Die Buddenbrooks “in 1959.

“Salto Mortale”, “The Bastian” and the “Sesame Straße”

He became known as Sascha Doria in the “Salto Mortale” circus series, in which he played from 1969 to 1972. He achieved the final breakthrough with the cult series “Der Bastian”, in which he played the title role. In the series, filmed after the novels by Barbara Noack, he fell in love with a doctor (Karin Anselm) as a Schnodderig -Sympathic student in real life. Like hardly any other, the series reflects the West German attitude to life after 1968.

His agent at the time wanted to reject the request from ZDF directly. But he read the script and agreed. Up to 15 million people per episode sat in front of the television sets in 1973 when “Der Bastian” was shown in the evening program. The role was an “absolute stroke of luck”, he wrote in his autobiography. There is hardly a day that he is not addressed with “Bastian”.

As a human guest star in the “Sesame Road” of the early 1980s, “Horst” was for an entire generation of children like a dear uncle who was lucky enough to be able to live with Tiffy and Samson in a perfect world.

Whether “Forsthaus Falkenau”, “Immenhof”, “A case for two”, “crime scene” or Rosamunde-Pilcher-Romances: There was hardly a television series in which Janson, who grew up in Mainz and Wiesbaden, could not be seen. In 2005 and 2006 the passionate hobby regulator for the TV series “Under White Sailing” was a captain in front of the camera.

Smile as a trademark

His radiant smile was his trademark and probably also a reason that the actor was considered a swarm of women for years – also as one of the best known and most popular German film and television actors. According to a study by the Nuremberg Society for Consumer Research (GfK), almost 85 percent of German Horst Janson knew in 2002, almost 71 percent of those surveyed considered him sympathetic or even very personable.

What the numbers would look like today is not known, the great success of Janson is a while ago. Most recently, he was mainly seen on the theater stage, worked at the Bad Hersfeld Festival and was always – mostly together with his wife – on the red carpets in Munich.

Janson also made headlines in 2011 when he wanted to prevent the foreclosure of his house in the Munich Nobel suburb of Grünwald with a fundraiser. 45,000 euros came together at the time.

The actor had to struggle with health problems last year. In the summer of 2024 it became known that after a fall he came from the stairs to the hospital.

Because of an illness, Janson had previously canceled his participation in the Bad Hersfeld Festival. There he should have occurred in June 2024 at the premiere of the play “As in Heaven”.