“Kronen Zeitung” (Sunday Edition) reported that Dagmar Koller spent his semi-circular birthday at his home in the Algarve, Portugal. She still needs to recover from a broken femur she suffered last year.
“I’m fine, but my body isn’t as strong as I’d like now. Sometimes I look at myself: what nonsense! Stupid leg, stupid leg… But should I worry about that? No!” He said in an interview with “Bild” newspaper in May.
Breakthrough as a Chinese princess
Dagmar Koller looks back on a long career. He was born on August 26, 1939 in Klagenfurt. After his father left the family, he moved to Vienna at the age of 13. She studied dance, singing and acting at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. She began her career as a dancer at the Vienna Volksoper at the age of 16 – and then went out into the world.
She took care of the couple’s children in London and Paris and attended famous ballet schools. She toured through Germany and Switzerland as a souvrette and operetta singer, and throughout Europe and Israel as an actress with Hans-Joachim Gullenkampf.
Before she was hired at Berlin’s Theater des Westens in 1966, she played the Chinese Princess Mia in Franz Lehr’s “Land of Smiles” in Hamburg in 1964, aged 25. “I didn’t work on a state stage. We always had to make sure we could fill the theater,” he recalls.
Starring as Eliza in “My Fair Lady”.
He learned to love the musical stage genre during tours and extended stays in America. In 1968, she scored her first major hit in this new genre as Dulcinea in the German-language premiere of “The Man from La Mancha.” This was followed by Eliza’s signature role in “Sweet Charity”, “Zorbas” and “My Fair Lady”, which she first performed in Cologne in 1971.
In 1973, her mentor Marcel Bravy brought her back to Vienna at the Volksoper for “Carousel”. He bid farewell to it in 1999 with his first solo show, “Songs of My Life,” but returned to the stage after a year’s hiatus in a revival of “The Man from La Mancha.”
Made several feature and operetta films
Later rising to the A-League of local celebrity in 1978, she married then-ORF program director Helmut Silk, who six years later assumed the post of mayor of Vienna. At his side he dined with Prince Charles, chatted with Lady Diana and met Princess Grace.
“At first it was very difficult for me to have to give up my stage career, but it was quickly pointed out to me that I was complaining at the highest level,” Kohler looks back. But soon he not only continued his stage career, but also recorded several records. The all-rounder made several feature and operetta films and appeared in several TV shows – “Music My Life” and the interview series “Hello, how are you?”
Portugal instead of a stage
In 1993, when Silk and Koller were returning to Vienna from Zurich, Zilk fell victim to a letter bomber named Franz Fuchs. Zilk’s middle and index fingers and parts of his thumb were torn off, and the blacksmith tied his hand in the bathroom. After the attack, she stayed away for almost four years and was there for her husband day and night.
Zilk’s death in 2008 dealt a severe blow to Koller. She mostly stayed out of the public eye. It was only four years later that he regained the limelight with his comeback show “Life for the Stage”.
In recent years, Kollar took a step back – “according to his age”. Instead of being on stage, he prefers to spend time at his home in Portugal. As he said in an interview with APA on his 80th birthday, “It’s to live.
