German actor Susanne Lothar, best known for her work with director Michael Haneke, has died suddenly at the age of 51. Her family lawyer, Christian Schetz, confirmed that Lothar died on Wednesday. He added he would not be providing further details "for understandable reasons".
Born in Hamburg, to actor parents, Lothar cut her teeth in theatre before winning the German federal film prize for her screen debut in the 1983 drama Strange Fruit. She went on to star in the likes of Snowland, the political saga If Not Us, Who? and Stephen Daldry's Oscar-winning Holocaust drama The Reader.
Lothar, however, was most acclaimed for her quartet of films with Haneke, starting with The Castle in 1997. She played an imperilled bourgeois in the controversial Funny Games, an anguished mother in The Piano Teacher and the local midwife in 2009's Palme d'Or winning The White Ribbon.
On both The Castle and Funny Games, Lothar acted alongside Ulrich Mühe, her off-screen husband. Muhe died of cancer in 2007, shortly after completing his acclaimed performance as a Stasi wiretapper in The Lives of Others.
Lothar was not believed to have been in ill health at the time of her death. She had recently finished work on two feature films – the family drama Dust of Our Hearts and Joe Wright's adaptation of Anna Karenina – while The Hollywood Reporter claims she was in the midst of shooting a role in another feature, Inner Amok, for the Austrian director Peter Brunner. She is survived by a son and a daughter.
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