Senta Berger

Since February 2003, Senta Berger has been president of the German Film Academy, who want to advance the new generation of actors and actresses in Germany and Europe and who will decide the assignment of the German Film Awards in the future. Due to scheduling conflicts the scene was shown on the Los Angelas set of General Hospital, instead of the New York set where All My Children is taped. In the same year, she also started a career as a singer of Chansons. She hosted a 25th Aniversary special about the show in 1995, and made a brief cameo as Verla on the January 5th 2005 episode celebrating the 35th aniversary of the program. Afterwards further serial hits follow, like “The fast Gerti”, where she plays a taxi driver. Burnett suddenly found herself playing the long lost daughter of Langly Wallingford (Louis Edmonds), and raising hell for her stepmother Pheobe Tyler-Wallingford (Ruth Warrick). In 1985/86, she started a comeback in front of German-speaking audiences in the very poular TV serial “Kir Royal”. She got to live a dream when Agnes Nixon created the role of Verla Grubbs for her.

Between 1974 and 1982, she played the “Buhlschaft” in the play “Jedermannn” at the Salzburg Festival with Curd Jürgens and Maximilian Schell. Burnett has been a long time fan of the soap opera All My Children. She successfully played at the Burgtheater in Vienna, at the Thaliatheater in Hamburg and at the Schillertheater in Berlin. Burnett was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors for 2003. The birth of her two sons caused Senta to turn back to the theatre. Burnett returned to TV in the mid 1990's as a supporting character on the sitcom Mad About You when she played Theresa Stemple, the mother of main character Jamie Buchman, played by Helen Hunt. Berger continued to develop her European career in France and Italy. The case is a landmark in the study of libel cases involving celebrities, although the unprecedented $1.6 million verdict was reduced on appeal, and the case was eventually settled out of court.

Other internationally successful films made by the duo included, amongst others, Die weiße Rose, The terrible girl (Das schreckliche Mädchen) and Mutters Courage. Burnett drew attention in 1981, when she sued the National Enquirer for libel after the tabloid newspaper described her alleged public drunkenness. In 1970, she starred for the first time in a film produced by her own company and directed by her husband. Its ensemble cast included Tim Conway, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner and Vicki Lawrence, who was cast partly because she looked like a younger Burnett. In 1966, they married, after starting up their own film production company the previous year. The hour-long The Carol Burnett Show was a huge success, garnering 22 Emmy awards and continuing to success in syndicated re-runs. In 1963, Berger met Michael Verhoeven, son of the German film director Paul Verhoeven (not the Dutch Paul Verhoeven). With her success on this variety show she finally came to headliner status and appeared in the 1962 special Julie and Carol and Carnegie Hall, also starring fellow singer/actress Julie Andrews.

An offer for a series role, which would have brought an obligation of several years with itself, was the reason for their return to Germany. In the same year she appeared on the Garry Moore television variety show as a regular until 1962. In 1962, she went to Hollywood and worked with stars such as Charlton Heston, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne and Yul Brynner. She achieved success in Broadway in the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress. Brauner used Senta Berger in several films, but soon she tired of musicals. She graduated from Hollywood High School and the University of California, Los Angeles, and worked her way up through bit parts on TV, coming to prominence in the mid-1950s singing a novelty love song, "I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles". More and more directors and producers wanted to work with her, for example Bernhard Wicki and Arthur Brauner, who produced the film The Good Soldier Schweijk with Berger and Heinz Rühmann, a famous German actor. Burnett was born in San Antonio, Texas to two alcoholic parents, who left her with her grandmother, who moved to Hollywood, California.

Her ambition was still to be a film actress. Carol Burnett (born April 26, 1933) was one of the most successful female comedians on American television, thanks largely to her variety show that ran on CBS from 1967 through 1978. In 1958, she became the youngest member of the Josefstadt theatre in Vienna. She applied for the Max Reinhardt Seminar, a famous acting school in Vienna, and was accepted, shortly afterwards was forced to leave, because she had accepted a film role without permission. In 1957, she won her first small role in a film.

Berger then took private acting lessons. But her dream of a career as a dancer was destroyed by her last teacher, who did not like the physical changes in Senta during puberty. At the age of five she started ballet lessons. With him, Senta first appeared on stage at the age of four, where he accompanied his daughter's singing on the piano.

Her father, from whom she probably inherited talent, was a musician. Senta Berger's parents were not rich, but tried everything to meet the desires of their daughter. Senta Berger (born May 13, 1941, in Vienna) is an Austrian actress and producer.