Katharina Matz

Born in 1930 in Bohemia, Matz trained to be an actress in Magdeburg, and started her career in Greifswald. Following this she was a member of the Deutsches Theater ensemble in East Berlin for four years, during which she made her debut in film with the DEFA. Since then, she has had numerous roles in films and on TV. At the end of the 1950s, she was brought to Hamburg by Ida Ehre, who reopened the Hamburger Kammerspiele after the war. Matz was engaged there for a period before being invited to the Thalia Theater by Willy Maertens. Here, she worked with directors such as Jürgen Flimm, Leander Haußmann and, on many occasions, Stephan Kimmig. She played Maria Josefa in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba in Andreas Kriegenburg’s production. She often worked with Kriegenburg including in Dea Loher’s Das letzte Feuer (The Final Fire), for which she won the Rolf Mares Prize in 2008, which is awarded for achievements in Hamburg’s theatre world, as well as Faust in Goethe’s Urfaust. She also performed in Jelinek’s Ulrike Maria Stuart and in an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers), directed by Nicolas Stemann. Katharina Matz is an honorary member of the Thalia Theater Hamburg. Since 2012 she played as a regular guest at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, appearing in productions including The Celebration (Das Fest), 100 Seconds (what are our lives about), The Visit, An Answer in the Silence, Old Masters and In the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer. as well as Heart of the Kraken (Das Herz der Krake), directed by Nora Schlocker, which will premiere in April 2020. Most recently she played in Hecuba – In the Heart of Darkness directed by Stephan Kimmig on the stage of the Deutsches Theater. Shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic in spring 2020, she was still rehearsing for the world premiere of Heart of the Kraken (Das Herz der Krake) by Nis-Momme Stockmann. On 3 March 2021, actress Katharina Matz passed away in Berlin after a short illness at the age of 90.